When nature calls? Phone meets toilet

[Guest guest]

This was too funny not to post.

When nature calls? Phone meets toilet: Your 'dropped-call' tales of woe

By Skelton, Staff Writer Jul 10, 2011 12:00 am

Christmas Eve. Fifty guests due within the hour. " Meg " 's 17-year-old

granddaughter emerged from the Auburn home's only bathroom, troubled.

" I think my cell phone fell down the toilet. "

" What do you mean, `I think?' " Meg remembers asking.

Well.

The teen had been chatting on the loo, stood up, tucked the phone into her

skinny jeans' pocket, and now, it wasn't there. It wasn't anywhere. The family

gathered in the bathroom. They flushed — normal as can be. They plunged —

nothing. Meg's husband reached into the bowl and felt around — zip.

" I dialed the number, the water started vibrating, " Meg said. " `You've got to be

kidding me!' "

So began a night of covert plunging and

dear-God-don't-let-our-guests-do-anything-of-substance and an early morning of

toilet disassembly.

Merry Christmas.

Hey, it happens. We asked readers to share their tales of toilet meets phone.

Tina Ouellette of ton is a school custodian. She approached the boy's

bathroom that fateful day the same as any other.

" I don't know what these gentlemen ate the past few hours, but it wasn't

pretty, " Ouellette said. " The toilet bowl was filled with odd looking things,

and weird smells were coming from it. "

She donned gloves, lifted up the seat and doused every inch of porcelain with

cleaner. Then she answered a quick phone call from her mother, returned the

phone to her right front pocket, leaned over the bowl . . .

You know what comes next.

Splish!

" Man, I was every emotion you can think of, " Ouellette said. She snatched up the

less-than-a-month-old phone from the ordorous depths. " I was praying for it to

be OK. It wasn't. "

She ran it under a hand dryer. The screen would work, then wouldn't. Voicemail

petered out. She checked it over and over for the next 24 hours. Ultimately,

success! Sort of. Everything functions but the keyboard.

" So I ask myself this question: `Is any phone really worth all that work?' " she

said. " I'm thinking 'Yes, if you really don't have a spare $300.' "

The Rev. Doug found himself rushing around at work, rushing into the

bathroom and rushing to grab his cell phone after it slipped from his grip —

woosh! — right into the urinal.

" I have been in a lot of pissy situations over the years but this took the

cake, " said the ton man. " I held the phone as far away from me as I could

while it dripped into the sink. I took out the battery and patted the phone down

with a paper towel. The phone went absolutely crazy for two days and now has to

be charged every night. "

His revelation: " I will go back to using the bathroom as a place to read or

think but never as a telephone booth. "

Seems a quick dunk is much more common than a full-on flush.

Mac , superintendent at the ton Auburn Water Pollution Control

Authority, the state's second-largest wastewater treatment plant with 11 million

gallons a day, catches lots of debris in his bar screens.

Mop heads. Dolls. False teeth. But nary a cell phone.

Same story at the Portland Water District, home to the state's largest facility.

" I checked with our plant manager and he doesn't have any tales of cell phones

found, " said Public Relations Manager Clements. " We find jugs, sticks,

and the most bizarre item that I have heard here is pants. "

Really people, pants?

" Meg " in Auburn said they navigated last year's party without incident — guests

didn't suspect a thing — and the next day her husband found the BlackBerry Storm

deep up into the neck of the toilet.

" Of course, the kid (was) still complaining, `I've got a date, I need the

phone,' " she said.

Grandpa covered it with disinfectant and stuck the phone in a plastic bag with

rice. Three days later it was back in business. The teen didn't lose a single

thing, navigating the buttons through the plastic bag to transfer off the old

phone onto the new.

Sure it still worked fine, but, " it was the who-wants-to-put-it-to-your-face

deal, " Meg said.

Who knows what horror that phone had seen.

Meg is still mortified, hence the request for anonymity. At one point during

that night, she said her granddaughter cried " `My world is on this phone!' I

said 'Guess what? Your life is in the toilet, baby.' "

http://www.sunjournal.com/bplus/story/1055461

The serious question er beneath this is: how do we make small cell phones less

likely to drop? B4 cell phones, there would have been a phone and cradle for

the receiver in the loo. But today?