My experience destroying iPods and phones is just short of legendary (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, and example 5).  Just when I thought I had kicked the habit of dropping them into toilets, off balconies, and in front of buses, I managed to one-up myself.

In May, New York Magazine listed some of the items in the waters around New York, and I’ll be letting them know that they can add a red iPod nano (Gen. 2) to the list.

I was out for a run on the East River Esplanade, and as I often do, I was holding my iPod in my hand.  For some reason, I believe to scratch an itch, I tried to transfer the iPod between hands, and was less than successful.  It fell, broke free from the headphones, and bounced over the edge.  By the time I had stopped my forward momentum (no easy task) and made it to the edge, it was no where to be seen.  It had disappeared into the murky depths of the East River, never to be seen again.

You wake up at 8am on a Sunday morning and you reach for the last coffee pod in your apartment.  As you approach the coffee machine, you drop the pod on the table, and it rolls off the table into the most inaccessible section of your kitchen.  To access this part of your kitchen, and retrieve the increasingly important coffee pod, you have to move the table; a feat that should only be attempted after you are fully awake.  Oh the irony.

Hemingway once said he wrote his best work in just six words.  I’ll give my latest phone woe a shot:

Dropped BlackBerry.  Bus.  Should’ve had insurance.

BlackBerry 8830 after being run over by a bus

What happens when you drop your BlackBerry in front of a moving NYC MTA bus?  Well, let’s just say that the bus wins.

I was walking home from dinner and stopped at a red light on Second Avenue.  I felt my BlackBerry buzz on my waist, so I reached up under my coat and started to pull it out.  Somehow, it got loose, plummeted to the ground, and bounced its way into the street, right in front of an oncoming bus.  I watched helplessly as my BlackBerry was run over by the behemoth.

Continue reading . . . 

Well, not really, but you get the idea.  Let’s start at the beginning:

7:00am -  E-mails from work wake me up.
7:30am - Log into work and see there is a problem with a NIC card on a server.
8:00am - Problem at work solved.  I’m wide awake.
8:05am - Decide to actually get out of bed and start the day (way too early for that normally).
8:15am - While enjoying first cup of coffee, decide to order a waffle from the diner since I had a craving for it.
8:35am - Waffle arrives.  I place tin with waffle in it on kitchen table.  Pour second cup of coffee.  Put second cup of coffee on top of fridge (normal spot where I pour the milk into it).
8:36am - Open tin with waffle in it.  Take waffle out and place on plate.  Open fridge to get syrup (real maple syrup from Vermont—the best!).  Grab syrup, open it, pour some into coffee.  Close syrup.  Place back in fridge.  Grab milk.  Open milk.  Start to pour milk onto waffle, but catch myself just before it comes out.  Wonder why I’m doing that.
8:37am - Open fridge, and remember that I was holding the syrup bottle a moment ago.  Look back at waffle and find there is no syrup on it.  Wonder where syrup went.  Look at coffee cup.  Say, “No way,” to myself.  Look in coffee cup.  See weird slick on top of coffee.  Sigh loudly.

See, the butterfly effect in it’s full glory.  A server NIC dies, and because of that, I put syrup in my coffee.  At least it sort of makes sense.

Now if I could only figure out why I keep putting shaving cream on my toothbrush in the morning…

After replacing the cordless phone lost in a previous incident, I was very careful not to bring the handset anywhere near a place that it could try to escape.  This new phone would spend it’s entire life in captivity.  I never thought it would resort to suicide.

This time I was on the phone with a friend. She was having some sort of problem, and for some reason, I was the therapist (although I was not being paid).  I had been on the phone for quite some time at this point, and I really had to go to the bathroom (#1).  There didn’t seem to be any natural rhythm to the conversation where I could break in with my natural urges, so to save time, I got up from the sofa in the living room and walked into the bathroom before cutting her off in mid-sentence to explain my problem. I explained that I had to take a quick bathroom break that I would call her back.  She said not to bother, and that I could put her on hold.

As I pulled down my shorts with right hand, I used my left hand to hit the hold button and place the phone on the sink, directly to the left of the toilet. Since I really had to go, nature started flowing the moment my shorts were clear of the “faucet”.  Being that it takes brainpower to aim, I was not concentrating as hard as I could on placing the phone down on the sink—and you guessed it—the handset took the plunge.

“Crap!” was the rather ironic exclamation that escaped my lips as I stared at the handset, now fully immersed, in the toilet.

After finishing my business (I told you, I really had to go), I had to fish around in a closet to find my backup corded phone, which is there for just such an emergency.  I called my friend back, explained the situation and asked for advice (the tables were now turned!).

She said that I should take the phone out, wash it off and if it was working, use it.

If the phone from Oops #1, which was surrounded by coffee grinds, tuna cans, etc., in plastic bags, was not going anywhere near me, then this phone could only be used if I was wearing a Level A Bio-hazard suit.

A new cordless phone was procured a few days later.  This new phone will not be used in the bathroom.

I was on my way to work one day, and as I descended the subway steps to the N, R, and W line, I noticed that a train was waiting on the platform with the doors open.  I ran down the steps and toward the door to the train.

Being that it was the morning and my mind was not up to speed yet, I forgot that I’m 6’6” and on those lines I must lower my head a little bit to get in without knocking myself out.

There were two hits.

The first was my head hitting the top of the door.  The second was my body hitting the ground.  I was stunned that one moment I was running for the train, and the next I was looking up at the ceiling of the platform with pain coming from my forehead.  The lower half of my body was in the train, while the rest of me was on the platform.

The doors tried to close, but my waist prevented them.  Someone on the train asked if I was OK.  I said that I thought so as I tried to raise myself from my inclined position.  I managed to get up and get in the car before the doors tried to close again.

I developed a small bump on my head that lasted for six days as a result of the incident.

I’ve learned that I should no longer run for a train.  If I make it, I make it.  If not, another one will be along in a few minutes.

One evening while cleaning up after dinner, my phone rang.  The cordless phone handset was sitting in the base near the front door.  As I went over to pick it up, I noticed that there was a bag of garbage near the door that I had neglected to take out to the chute.  I picked up the phone, and started talking to the friend that had called.

As I was talking, I reached down and picked up the bag of garbage in one hand.  I snuggled the phone between my ear and my shoulder so that I would have my other hand free to open the door, which I did.  I then walked the fifteen feet to the garbage chute on my floor, opened it, put the bag of garbage down it, and then watched in horror as my phone leaped from my ear/shoulder, and followed the bag of garbage down the chute.

“Shoot!” I exclaimed.

Thinking that my friend would still be able to hear me, I yelled, “I’ll call you back!” down the chute.  I then hurried back to my apartment, pressed the speakerphone button on the cordless phone base and said, “Hello?” wondering if my friend was still on the line.

“What happened?” was their reply.  “It sounded like you fell down a few flights of stairs.”

Well, it was now time to replace a perfectly good cordless phone.  I suspect that the handset was tired of being cooped up in my apartment all day long, and made a break for freedom.  Too bad it’s freedom would be spent surrounded by bags of old cans of tuna, orange peels, coffee grinds and paper towels with God-knows-what on them.

Even if the handset did work after the fall, I didn’t want it anywhere near my ear or lips.

One nice summer evening I was at a get together at a friends apartment.  The apartment’s on the 26th floor and has a balcony with a very nice view. I was on said balcony enjoying the view and talking on my cell phone, when by buddy (who we’ll call “Einstein”) came up behind me and slapped me on the back, to say “Hi”.  This slap cause my phone to leap from my hand, hit the balcony floor, and fall off the balcony toward the courtyard below.

I never actually saw the phone hit the courtyard because it was dark.  When I got down to the lobby of the building and asked the doorman if he heard something fall into the courtyard, he told me that the cellphone was in a lot of pieces as he handed me a few of the bigger pieces.

It’s about 8:30am on a weekday morning, and I’m on my way to work.  It’s early March, and the Winter has been relatively mild.  The temperature is in the mid-forties.

As the subway approached the 23rd Street stop, I started to move into position to exit the car.  So did others.  The doors opened, and we all made to move to get out.  As I was leaving the car, just as I was about the move my left foot from behind me to in front of me, the person behind me managed to step on the back of my foot and pin my shoe to the floor.  I fell forward, out of my shoe, and out of the car.  I managed to get up and start to go back for my shoe, but alas, I was too late.  The doors closed.

I waited right next to the door hoping that it would open quickly enough for me to get my foot in there to keep it from closing, and someone on the inside would hand me my shoe.  No such luck.  The subway started to move, and my shoe was on a nice little trip to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Dejected, I trudged to work.  My little toes got quite cold during the four block walk to my office.  I must have looked a little funny walking around without a shoe, but this is NYC, people have seen a lot weirder.

After getting to work, and enduring quite a few comments about my lack of attire (“what, you get dressed in the dark?”, “Can’t afford two shoes?”, etc.) I started to do some work until 10am when the shoe store a few blocks away would open.

After walking over to the shoe store and finding a pair of shoes that I liked, the salesperson asked what happened to my shoe.  I explained, and he told me that I was about the fourth person that year that he had seen with the same problem.

At least I’m not alone.

One weekday, I was at the 57th and 7th station of the N & R subway line heading downtown.  I was at the top of the stairs to the subway platform when I noticed a train had just pulled in.  I ran down the steps as fast as I could, and got into the train just as the doors closed.

Since it was midday, there was no problem finding a seat.  As I sat down, I heard a very audible “rip”.  I looked around, and a women near me said, “Sounds like you ripped something.”  I asked her if I were to stand up if she could see if I ripped my pants (jeans).  She said sure.  I stood up, and she told me that my pants were fine.  I checked my shirt, jacket, etc. but could not find the rip.  Then she suggested it might be my underwear.  Here I am in the middle of the New York City Subway, and I have to figure out if my underwear is ripped.  So, I nonchalantly sit down and put my hand down the back of my pants, and, sure enough, my boxers were very ripped.

Now, on a normal day, I wouldn’t care, but that day was not a normal day.  I had a doctors appointment that afternoon, and there was a very slight chance that he could ask me to remove my pants during the examination.  Luckily, there is a Gap store about two blocks from my office.

I ran over there after getting out of the subway, found a pair of boxers and went to the cash register.  The cashier took my boxers and asked if that was all.  I said, “Yes”, and then realized that when a man buys only one pair of boxers in the Gap, it could look like he had an “accident”.  So I sort of related the whole story of ripping my current pair in the subway.  She just looked at me through the whole story like I was crazy.  Then she said, “I don’t think your girlfriend’s gonna buy that story”.  To which I explained that the story is all true.  I even offered to take my pants off right there to prove it.

She declined.