Best Case Scenario

There is too much going on and I am too busy having fun with people outside the computer to write much this week—remember when I said I wanted to post pictures of last weekend? Obviously I meant next weekend—BUT I would be very remiss, my fine blog-reading friends, if I did not report to you the news that my cell phone, the one I not-very-smartly put through the washer (you may have heard the keening wail coming from the Southern Hemisphere)—that cell phone, my friends, the one about which I found myself mooning fondly during the long dark days during which I had to make do with some sort of Nokia brick that displeased me mightily…that cell phone WORKS. Someone called me and I answered! I texted someone else and managed to make plans for the night! The alarm went off this morning, dredging me from sleep as it always does! O THE MIRACLE!

Yeah, seriously, I have no time to write this, but you know what I did? I left the phone out in the sun like my cousin told me during the day while I was away, and then at night I put the space heater on it until it got too hot in my room, and then I left it out overnight, and then I did the whole thing again. I was really worried because my SIM card, once I put it into the outstandingly inferior loaner phone someone at work gave me, wasn’t giving me my contacts. And when I called the Vodafone people, there was this…silence on the other end of the line, when I told them what I’d done. “Uh…once you get those in water they tend…they tend not to go so well?” said the customer service representative. I flinched and cursed and waved my fist at the sky, especially when I read all y’all’s comments about how your phone was never the same again, or how your phone was absolutely fine, or how I should pour isopropyl alcohol in my phone, or how I would electrocute myself and everyone I loved if I plugged it in and it was still wet inside. I was not sanguine about this whole operation, because it seemed like things could go either way, with this phone, and I hate it when things can go either way.

I took it to the Vodafone store on Manners Mall yesterday as I was coming back from the train station, and I was ready to fess up to the amusingly hair-gelled phone guy behind the counter. “Look,” I said, shrugging to suggest a fatalistic world-weariness I did not, in fact, feel. “I kind of put this phone through the washer a couple of days ago or whatever, so…” I let it trail off, as if to say it could go either way, which was fine with me because I am just fine with things going either way.

The gel phone guy raised his eyebrows a little. “I don’t have any expectations, or anything,” I lied, grinding my teeth. “I just want to know what’s going on.” He got out another phone and stuck my SIM card in, showing me that I had not, in fact, saved my contacts to SIM, which makes total sense because I didn’t even know you could save a contact to SIM. “We’ll just have to see…” he said, popping the battery in.

I leaned in close, breathless with anticipation. No expectations, I reminded myself. I cursed the buyer who’d outbid me by two dollars just the night before for a phone on TradeMe, while I was watching House and The L Word and doing a face mask. The little red screen came up, with the friendly “How are you today?” I’ve come to love.

No water under the screen. No short-outs. No wonky keypad or lost contact numbers or weird noises. It’s all fine and good. “Wow,” said the gel phone guy, refusing to charge me for his ten minutes of labor. “I was really shocked to see that. Usually that doesn’t happen at all. I wouldn’t have thought you’d be this lucky.”

I almost never get the best case scenario, you know?