The day was calm just like any other. The birds chirped, the sun was shining in the sky and my dining hall pasta was lukewarm. Then I realized I didn’t have any socks left to wear, so I pondered to myself, “should I do laundry?”.
If future me had only been there to warn past me of what treacherous danger lie ahead.
I grabbed my clothes and started piling them in my basket. I brought my phone to the laundry room so I could maybe answer a few emails if I had to wait. BUT, my plan hit a snag. I could not carry my phone and the large laundry basket! So I did what any normal person would do, I put it on top of the load.
When I reached the laundry room I swiftly placed my laundry in a machine and hit start. It was then, yes, right then, that I subconsciously realized what I had done. I walked back up the stairs with a sort of disconnected panicked feeling. As I hit the threshold of my room I started searching for my phone. My brain was trying to protect me from this heinous act of murder I had just committed. Then it hit me, I dropped everything I was holding and ran downstairs in a desperate panic-tornado for the life of my phone… but it was too late.
Unfortunately, college washing machines have this really fun feature that locks the machine while it runs. I knew this, but it did not stop me from aggressively trying to pull the washer open. I did this for about two minutes and also pressed all the buttons on the machine at least twice. All of my calm collected smart tactics were somehow not working so I enlisted the help of an R.A. This was our exchange…
Me: Hey so I might’ve uh… like.. well…okay so uughgh… how does one unlock a washing machine?
R.A.: Oh you can’t really do that, why?
Me: So my phone is in one right now-
R.A.: Oh yeah…so all the people before who’ve done that just like have to let it run
After this conversation, she did try contacting a bunch of people, but the ultimate answer was that I just had to let it run through the cycle. Now, all that chaos only took four minutes. So then all I had left to do was sit and listen to my phone bang around in the washing machine for another thirty-one. During this time, I looked up hundreds of articles on how to mend a phone after its been in the washing machine. Most of them said my phone was dead forever, but I liked the denial better.
My afternoon somehow progressed even worse because it involved explaining to five different Apple employee’s what I did to my phone. By the fifth tech person, it started to be funny, but also still made me wanna cry a lil bit. So the moral of the story kids is don’t, under any circumstances, put your phone in the washing machine.