A Dark and Stormy Night, and a Loss

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A Dark and Stormy Night, and a Loss

1/11/2006

By Terry Calhoun

It was a dark and stormy night in the mall parking lot last Saturday, and it was impossible to see that, lurking under the sheen of melted ice water, there was a car-destroying pothole. First the right front, then the right rear wheels of my red Aveo smashed into what really was a double set of potholes. A hundred yards later, it had two flat tires and additional damage.

Moments after that, my wife received a telephone call from my youngest daughter, who was the driver, who said "Can I talk with dad?" So, I talked with her, and about 15 minutes later showed up to take charge of the recovery operations in my red Suburban. The series of events that unfolded during the next 24 hours led to the loss of my Treo 650 and then a decision to try what "the kids" are doing, so my new phone is a red (of course) Sanyo Multimedia Phone MM-8300, with bells and whistles but without Palm functionality.

While we waited for a tow truck, I positioned my Suburban with its light on the potholes in question; four-ways flashing of course, and got out my Treo 650 to capture images of the area. My son had left a 6-pack of tall diet Mountain Dew bottles in the car, so I used them to display the depth of the potholes: one sitting beside it, the other down in it, with the cap barely sticking out. As I did, I muttered to myself that I wished the Treo camera had a flash on it, or that I had my other camera with me.

Then, as I positioned the last shot, the bottle in the pothole shifted and when I reached out for it (cold, numb hands) my Treo fell. I was quick, my hands were in the water, under it, and flipping it back out before it has even sunk an inch. I struck it so hard that the back flew off and the battery flew out as well. Not one piece landed in and stayed in the water.

Normally, I would have focused on my Treo crisis, but there was this issue of a car to be towed on a cold, dark night, so I took the pieces and placed them on my car heater, with the keypad down, mentally crossed my fingers, and went about doing what had to be done with the car. (Total repair cost to the car, BTW, was $300.80 and now I have to decide whether to bother going after the mall for the damages; I did go back and get better images with a real camera the next day, including a very scary video of my wife driving the Surbuan through the potholes at slow speed.)

If you've read my columns for a while, you know that I wrote one last year about the hilarious ways that people drop their cell phones into water. I had known it would eventually happen to me, but it didn't help my sense of despair, because the Treo is expensive and I had only three months ago had one go bad on me, a week outside the warranty. I also knew from the previous piece that the manufacturer would not help me with this incident, because they don't feel responsible for people dropping their phones into water. Imagine that.

The next morning, I took my spare Treo battery and plugged it into my Treo. Nothing happened. I tried the old battery. Nothing happened. I tried putting it onto the charger, it started making little clicking sounds. I wept. (Not really, but I felt like it.)