It's a Damn Miracle!

Saturday morning, I decided, was a good day to spend by the pool, or in it. It was only 100 freakin' degrees outside in Austin, in an unseasonably hot and drought-y June, and the pool looked all sparkly and refreshing and woefully lonesome for company.

At first I sat in a lounger, reading The World According to Garp, and when I got sweaty, I headed for a dip. I stepped down into the water and leaned over to run my hands through it or look at my shadow or some damn thing. Point is, I don't know why I chose to bend over, as it were, but at that precise moment, my cell phone fell out of my swim top. And sank to the bottom. Of the pool. In zig-zag fashion. While I watched. Dumbfounded, and wondering why the hell I stashed my cell phone between my boobs when the whole point of hanging by the pool is to relax, uninterrupted.

Since I hadn't yet gotten all the way into the water—because it was freakin' cold despite the ambient inferno—I gasped and eased in as quickly as I could, up to my hips, with more gasping—and the requisite F-bombs—and used my toes to scoot the phone up the wall, like Patrick Swayze with the penny in Ghost. And I shed tears as I watched the phone rise to the surface with my toes sliding it up. And then I was a believer:  never stick your phone between your boobs if you're going to bend over.

So I got the phone in my hands and opened it (like Captain Kirk with his communicator, requesting a beam-up), and the itty bitty screens were completely black, and within a few minutes of sitting on the scalding deck, they were filled with water spots and mist, and I thought shit, shit, shit, and shit.

Breathing deeply in search of some sort of so-the-hell-what zen, I left the cell in the sun and spent the next hour as a rotisserie chicken on a plastic raft. And then I bitched about my little catastrophe on FaceBook and Twitter, until my roomie offered a most unusual solution.

I call it the Rice-a-Phoni trick. You fill a baggie with rice—in this case, long-grain white—then drop your disassembled cell phone into it and seal it up. Wait 24 hours, while holding your breath.

I did this, and nothing short of the miraculous occurred. We reassembled the phone, et voila! working cell phone! Brought back to life by Rice-a-Phoni, the incredible cell phone feat.

If I could get the same sort of healing for my rotisserie burn, I'd be chin deep in a bathtub full of Rice-a-MyOwny. Ba-da-boom!
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