My cell phone has been broken for the past few months. In a fit of early morning rage due to the alarm not turning off, I hit the phone repeatedly against the wall. I honestly didn’t think I was doing it hard enough to do any damage, but I was wrong. The screen spider-webbed, with only some of the text obscured. It was managable, since I could still find contacts and see what the time was. Using Bluetooth, I can pull all of the names and calendar events off the phone without fearing that they are lost forever.
My “minor” damage after a while has increased to the point where the screen is barely visible. Most of it is a giant black mark that occasionally vibrates. I am lucky to tell if the phone is on loud or ringer off now. Yesterday I dropped the phone and managed to step on it during the process of finding it. Well I found it with a missing volume button and messed up the already bad screen even more. I’m guessing that this cell phone was doomed to die. I’m also guessing that I’ll have to go buy a new screen before the two-year phone replacement comes up with Verizon, ensuring that I get a new phone for fairly cheap.
This is not the first time I’ve had issues with a cell phone. I used to own a Treo 300 that resembled a grey pocket brick that could flip out and zap Klingon’s. It was a freaking beast. The beast, to its credit, had some of the best reception and had an awesome conference mode. It was not to my fortune that the beast also had some of the thinnest gauge wiring between where the ear piece/cover would flip out. After, lets say six months, of ownership it started to flake out. I had to open the phone and rewire the damn thing.
By the time I had to order a new phone just for replacement parts, I had replaced the wiring completely and ran out of points on the board that I could re-route the ear piece to. The phone had other considerable wear at this point too. Paint had worn in on the phone, removing the metallic grey paint and just leaving a dull grey finish on the old phone. Buttons stopped functioning and the screen had dirt between the glass. The replacement parts only limped my phone along just a bit longer, until it got to the point where my mother sent me her old phone so I’d have something reliable.
What I am trying to get at is, well, you would be surprised by how refreshing it is to have a phone that isn’t broken. I guess you just don’t appreciate that fact until your phone starts to flake out.
