h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It seems that every second hootooer has either a relative or a friend who dropped their mobile phone in the toilet.

I'm surprised this seems to be such a common thing to happen, especially since I don't have a family member or friend whom this has happened to. (It never happened to me, either).


So that makes me wonder: did this happen to you or somebody you know, too?

What's the worst place you dropped your mobile phone in?

On the floor I must have a dull life

(But my once drooled (or peed?) on it. It was at night and she was 'fighting' with an outdoor cat on the other side of the bedroom window.)

Oh, and that is 'into' the toilet - just to be clear.

I haven't, but I have an anecdote about it. Excited?

I used to work at the Odeon cinema in Ipswich (RIP) which stood next to the Regent theatre. Occasionally you would see some of the talent wandering around locally. Jim Davidson came up and asked about what was showing. He wasn't impressed (but he is an idiot).

Anyway, I was in the café down the road having a coffee before my shift when who should walk past but Mark "This week, I have been mostly..." Williams and Simon "That's Amazing" Day from the Fast Show. Starstruck I nipped out with a napkin and asked for autographs. While they were signing for me Mark dropped his mobile, and in a reflex tried to catch it with his foot but kicked it into the gutter. Duly I picked it up, wiped it and returned it to him. I thought about running away with it to see whose numbers might be on there, but I was in uniform and fairly easy to recognise. They were both very nice. This is my droping a mobile phone anecdote. Thank you.

Nice one, Christopher.

Like Toybox, I only ever dropped my mobile on the floor.

My brother once dropped his in a bucket full of water with which he had swept the floor, and somebody once pushed my son into the river, which very nearly killed his phone.

Hubby left one of his phones in his jeans, which went through a full machine wash and only just missed out on being tumbled dried! We opened it up and left it to dry in the full sun on the window ledge. It still works four years later!

I have never (yet) dropped mine so hard or into such a silly place that it no longer worked. However my ex son-in-law regularly used to drop his into such places as buckets of wet cement, ( he was a builder) off the top of scaffolding. He also dropped one into water whilst fishing...

My daughter also left one in her cargo pants ( remember when they first came into fashion?) and I put them in the washing machine....oops.

"Somebody once pushed my son into the river, which very nearly killed his phone"
- I see your priorities here!

"Mum, I got pushed into the river!"
- "Oh no!! How's your phone?"

There are special builders' mobiles - my cousin has one. It's huge, but it's waterproof and has rubber shock absorbers

I'm on my third mobile. The first one eventually wouldn't recharge, the second one was stolen. (Big prize for the thief - it was a 10€ one with less than 1€ left on the prepaid card. But all my numbers were gone. )

A friend of my daughter's was walking down a busy street in Dublin, talking on the phone, and a thief grabbed the phone right out of her hand. Then he looked at it, said "This is a rubbish phone" and handed it back to her.

I've broken my phone on an attempted mugger's face. My reasoning was that if I didn't fight back, I'd lose it anyway so I might as well lose it doing something useful.

Another phone dropped out of my pocket while I was cycling at about 20kph and it landed in a big puddle in the middle of the road. Amazingly, it still worked.

Congratulations HonestLago on your clear thinking with your mugger. Good use of a mobile.

I dropped my work mobile down a drain in a car park. It was a deep one and there was water in the bottom. You get a special noise when you drop things into deep water.

When switched off, this particular phone service would anounce that it was off and advise sending a text (like that would help!). It was still accepting calls rather than going to answerphone for 4 days after so I know that it was still working.

I made no effort to retrieve it since I was working about 100 miles away from my office base. This model was on sale in supermarkets PAYG for £20 at the time.

PP

I dropped mine in Bradford once. I think that's the worst place I've dropped it.

RF

i once heard that 6 percent of all cell phones sooner or later are dropped into toilets

but then 42 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot, so...

i usually carry my phone in my breast pocket and it is probably only a question of time until it will pop out when i bend down to pull my trousers up

never happened yet, though. *touches wood*

however i have twice dropped an electronic kitchen alarm clock into a pot. first time in a pot with pasta, the second time while i was cooking jelly

only one thing to do: pull it up as fast as you can, take out the battery, rinse well and leave it to dry for a couple of days

it still w*rks



ps: when a friend heard about the pasta he asked - with stiff upper lip - "oh really, so how many minutes did it take to cook the clock al dente?"

My husband did in fact drop his down the toilet once.

I dropped mine in a pond once. Unfortunately it was in my jeans pocket at the time*! After a week of drying out, even the water patterns on the screen had gone and now, 2½ years later, it's still going strong.

Deb


*If anyone's interested, I was teetering on the edge of the pond trying to reach my dog's ball with the chukkit. The split second before I toppled, the thought sauntered across my mind: "How stupid is this for a £1 ball? You're going to fall in".

Post 10 happened to me practically word-for-word, but it was a camera.

The good thing about the mobiles falling in water is that they almost *always* work once they've dried out.

I've never* dropped my mobile phone.
and I've had dozens... err, about fifteen differnt mobiles to be exact since my first one in 1997....
Though.
I did once distroy a mobile phone, kind of on purpose... (well I was drunk so it seemed like an 'on purpose' and 'sensible' thing to do at the time).
The phone was a brand new Nokia 9210I (probably one of the first 'smartphone' type thigns... more like a very* small PDA/portible computer; with a ditty little qwerty keybaord on it.
Anyhow. It'd just cost me about £300 the week before.
It err...
Pissed me off.
So I picked it up and threw it, as hard* as I could against the very solid brick walls we have in this house.
Which, supprizingly, didn't make it work any better, quite the reverse.
I went out the next week and bought an identicle one to replace it.
'What an idiot' seems quite an apt description for someone who does such a thing...
Oh, the replacement lasted about ten months before it died of natural causes...

I haven't dropped one in the loo, but I nearly did, at an h2g2 meet. I took it out of my back pocket, where it was half hanging out, had a very ladylike piddle, and then left the phone in the cubicle, where it was stolen.

Does that count?

Bet you wished you'd dropped it in the toilet instead, eh?

I dropped mine in a fresh cup of hot, sweet coffee. Well, I knocked it off the arm of the sofa into the cup...

I took it apart and left it a week. When I put the battery back in, it made a funny fizzing noise, smoked a bit and smelt funny so I took the battery back out and called my provider for a replacement.

A couple of months ago at a bike festival a friend of mine had 'zombie hand' for the weekend after having to fish in her own portapotty for her expensive and dearly loved PDA...

Apparently the feaces was simply grim, the lumps of vomit were what made it *really* barely worth it.

Needless to say, we were more of the opinion that one should let sleeping phones lie.

The hand stayed blue despite several scrubbings for three days after the festival and her nails flaked off.