My smartphone has given me a new way of looking at life:  Sideways.

     Read on.

If you drop you phone in the mud, grab it quickly. I did. Then put the phone in rice for a few days. Who does that? If you do, you’ve ruined all that rice, and your phone’s probably not going to survive anyway. (Unless you think it’s OK to eat rice that’s been soaking up phone moisture. Even I don’t eat phone rice.)

       Important:

Don’t turn your phone on to see if it’s working if it’s gotten wet. Yep. I turned mine on. At that moment, it was working.

Next I extracted the phone from its semi-protective case. The top right screen corner didn’t look like it was nailed down just right – something I’d never noticed before. I pried it up more to let the moisture out. After all, that was the muddiest corner.

I was careful. I used really small scissors. Then I stuck a toothpick in it to keep it open. Two toothpicks, in fact, but just barely. You’ve gotta be careful with these delicate phones. Then I set it close to a little electric heater to dry it.  

Those emergency measures did the trick, except only the left half of the screen responded to my touch afterward. Then I read online there’s a little gizmo called a digitizer in that upper right corner. It must have suffered some abuse somehow – like maybe I poked it with those scissors.

       Advice: 

       Never poke your digitizer with scissors.

       More advice: 

If you’re near a livestock tank, secure your phone. This time it was just mud. The first time was worse. If you have a phone strung around your neck, don’t lean over the stock tank. Enough said.

Meanwhile, if the right half of your phone screen quits working, readjust your life. I did. You create new pathways in your brain when you break habits. For instance, if you change the way you put on clothes, like left pant leg first instead of the right one, you keep your brain on its toes. Me, I found myself inventively turning my phone all sorts of sideways and other ways to make good use of the operable left side. Texting took the most acrobatics.

Fortuitously, I’d already ordered a new screen because of some pre-mud LCD issues. The replacement screen arrived on mud day. Yay!

Fixing phones is the newest skill on friend-employee Terri’s resume. On mud night I watched her don two pairs of glasses and use her tiny tools to execute the procedures. Think surgery. Only one extremely small part popped out and flew off somewhere. Terri has shaggy carpet.

       Terri robbed a parts phone to finish the job. Yay!

You can let a real technician fix your phone. Ho-hum. That will be $100. You don’t even get to watch.

       Or you can take a chance on a friend. Risky.

       I like risk.

       Time to check the stock water. Life on the edge. I’m taking the phone.

Hanaba Munn Welch, a correspondent for the Times Record News who divides her time between Abilene and a farm north of Vernon, appears on Mondays.  Her columns, as a tribute to the Childress Engine 501, always contain, amazingly, 501 words.

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