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 . . . 

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.

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.