Death By Water

A couple of summers ago I was on my way home from work and, as was the habit back when we were making a commute of 65 miles one way, I tried to call Tom on my way to let him know when to expect me.

Each call I attempted to make went unanswered.

I was relieved when I pulled into the driveway and found him in the garage. He was surprised to see me since I hadn't called to let him know I was on my way.

I informed him that I had called, over and over and over again.

He went on a treasure hunt, the treasure being his phone.

It was nowhere to be found.

Tom traced his steps and eventually found the charred remains of his phone in the burn barrel. When he'd leaned over to put something in there, his phone had fallen out of his shirt pocket and into the fire. It was beyond repair.

Last night he was again looking for his phone. I used my phone to call him. It went to his voice mail before any of us could even hear the ring in order to track it down.

He muttered something about it maybe being in his pants pocket.

The pants that had gone into the washing machine not ten minutes before.

I raced to the basement, opened the washer which was in the agitate cycle and drove my hand into the water, digging through clothes to the very bottom (of course) to find the pants he'd been wearing earlier in the day.

There it was.

I pulled the phone out of the pants' pocket, took it upstairs where Tom took it from me, took the battery and the sim card out and began the drying out process.

This morning, the phone did turn on and when he tried to call me, the call went through, but the little screen fogged up.

The phone, with the battery back out of it, is sitting by one of our registers. We're hoping this time it's salvagable. It could happen.

It appears, in this case anyway, that fire is more destructive than water. I wonder though if the phone had been allowed to go through the spin cycle if we'd be so lucky.

And yes, I did promise to check pockets from this point on when I'm doing laundry. Sigh.