My cell phone is clean

I washed my cell phone the other day by submerging it in a tub of scalding, soapy dishwater, and it came out squeaky clean.

My downfall is that I don’t have a watch. Sans watch, I grab my phone to check the time. Friday night, with my right hand, I was trying to fill a pot full of water from the tap to cook some green beans. With my left hand, I was trying to check the cell phone. I should really know better than to tax my brain to attempt two tasks at the same time.

The result was pretty predictable. The pot in my right hand began to sag with the weight of the water, and my lighting-quick reflexes decided that, if it was a choice between saving my cell phone from falling into a bucket of hot dishwater, or saving the pot of water form spilling, by God, I wasn’t going to spill a single drop of that water!

Once that little peanut of logic in my frontal lobe noted that the cell phone in the dishwater was a priority of an entirely higher order, I cavalierly dropped my pot of green-bean water and scalded both hands blindly fishing my phone out of the dishtub.

The true miracle is, my phone survived. Not at first, of course. It was completely dead at first. But I learned a trick from my brother, who has soaked two different digital cameras at two different amusement parks, and saved them both; unscrew everything you can and let it dry out for a couple of days.

Voila! It wasn’t up to snuff immediately, though. After 24 hours of drying, the phone dialed the number six, ghost-like, as a single long tone whenever I flipped it open.

Six is speed dial for my Mom and Dad, so I almost called them about 12 times on Sunday. God, probably, was trying to give me a hint about filial duty and Honoring Thy Ma and Pa and what-not, but he gave up on me as a lost cause pretty quick, as, after 48 hours of drying, the six key fixed itself. All right!

Man, I should really call my parents . . .