If it ain't one thing…
If it ain't one thing… 
On Thursday, I dropped my phone in the toilet. (Don't worry, the toilet was clean, but still…) It died. Then, in the third hour, it was resurrected, and appeared to live again. Alas, the damage was done, and the menu select button no longer worked, along with the 5 and the 0. I suppose I could have gotten by, but two of the the area codes in metro Atlanta are 770 and 404, and we use 10-digit dialing, so I would have been pretty well unable to call…well…almost anybody.
I took it to the local cell phone technician, who pronounced it dead (or at least very sleepy) and sold me a refurbished Motorola V-551
for the whopping sum of $185. At least I have a functional phone once again.
File this nugget away: If ever your cell phone comes into contact with water (be it the toilet variety, or a swimming pool, or your washing machine), I'm told the correct course of action is to immediately remove the battery and set the phone aside for about 24 hours to allow it to fully dry out. If you can, take it to a technician and ask them to do a “liquid treatment” on it. Assuming you haven't turned the phone on, it's possible that they can fix it. Apparently the worst possible thing you can do is to try and turn the phone on while it's still damp inside…it shorts things out and does permanent damage. Lesson learned.
…it's another
On top of that, the hard drive in my laptop
failed overnight. It's been hinting that it wasn't happy for several months, but I never thought it would just up and die so uncermoniously. I have a spare that's undergoing rigorous SpinRite testing right now, but I'll still have to reinstall everything from scratch and spend days getting all of the settings the way I like it. Like I had time for that right now.
