Michelle and I purchased our iPhones when Apple released the 3G model in July of ’08. It is hands down, the best gadget I have ever owned. Shortly after the new year, I noticed that there was a stuck pixel on my iPhone’s screen. The pixel would always be the opposite color of whatever it was supposed to be. Shortly after I noticed that pixel, I noticed another that was stuck.

I called the nearest Apple store and made an appointment to meet with someone to discuss my pixel issue. The next day Michelle and I went to a very crowded Apple store and looked at all of the beautiful electronics until my name was called. I showed the Apple employee my phone and told him about the problems. He also pointed out some dust that had apparently gotten under the glass screen. He said he needed to talk to someone else about it, then went into the back room. A few minutes later he came back out with a small box. Inside that box was a brand new iPhone. He slid a piece of paper in front of me, and I initialed twice and signed twice. He then handed me my new phone and wished me a happy day. 

Michelle was a little annoyed that my phone was now newer  and shinier than hers, but I she got over it. I, too, quickly got over the excitement when the screen stopped responding the next day. I thought that maybe the phone was just frozen. (iPhones aren’t perfect, they freeze on occasion and have to be rebooted.) I pressed the sleep button on the top of the phone, and instead of the screen turning black, it turned white. I did a hard reset (turned it all of the way off, then let it reboot) and that seemed to fix the problem. Until the next day. Apparently it was a reoccurring problem, and no matter how many reboots I performed, the issue remained. At times I was even unable to turn the phone off. So I called Apple support. They suggested that I restore the phone to factory conditions to see if the problem still persisted. When I plugged the phone into my computer, iTunes did not recognize that anything was plugged in. After more troubleshooting with Apple support, I finally got the phone to be recognized and restored. 

As soon as the phone booted up, it locked up and turned white. Apple support determined that it was a hardware problem, and suggested I take it to an Apple store to have it replaced. So, I made another appointment at an Apple store to meet, once again, to have my phone replaced. Michelle and I arrived 15 minutes late for my appointment. If we had arrived one minute earlier, they would have seen me right then and there. Unfortunately, due to the high volume of traffic in the stores, I was placed on standby until a space opened up. We played with the computers for about 30 minutes until someone else missed an appointment. I handed the phone to an employee. He went into the back room and brought out another brand new iPhone. I initialed and signed twice more, and walked out of the store with another new phone.

This phone, fortunately, has not caused me any problems. Until I dropped it in a cup of coffee a week ago. I was sitting in the living room playing on the phone and drinking a cup of coffee (brewed with my Keurig coffee maker). Somehow, (no thanks to gravity) I dropped the phone into the coffee. It fell top end first into a half empty* cup. The music immediately stopped playing (I cussed profusely), but the screen did not seem affected. I quickly dried it off,  turned off the power, and took out the SIM card. I had been saving all of the silica gel beads I could find for just an occasion. I emptied the beads into a tupperware container and tossed in the phone. After a while I took the phone out and used a cotton swab to dry out the earphone jack and the SIM card slot as much as possible. Apple places a small piece of paper in the bottom of the earphone jack that is white, until it gets wet, at which point it turns red. This way when someone brings in a broken phone, they can look to see if it had been dropped in the toilet, or a cup of coffee. Amazingly, the water sensor was still white. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, the speaker was still not working. The phone went back into the silica gel beads while I scoured the internet for solutions. Most forums suggested using compressed air or a hair dryer. One person said he put his in the oven. Since I didn’t have any compressed air, and I didn’t want to bake my phone, I tried a hair dryer. 

The phone worked fine, other than the speaker issue. I couldn’t hear anybody on the phone, so I grabbed my bluetooth headset and went to work. After using the headset a couple of times to make and receive phone calls, the speaker miraculously began working again. 

And I lived happily ever after.

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* I’m not a pessimist. I see the cup as half full if it’s in the process of being filled, and half empty if it’s in the process of being emptied. If I were to come across a random container filled/emptied to the mid-point, I would just say it’s half.

The picture above was slightly time consuming. There’s the large iPhone, which has this page displayed on it. The iPhone in the iPhone also has this page displayed, as well as the one inside of it (even if you can’t see it). The things I do to entertain myself…