TORONTO - Vincent Soper won't soon forget the fleeting moment of panic he felt as he jumped to reach a switch in a washroom of the movie theatre where he works and his beloved new cellphone lurched from his right-hand jacket pocket.
The 15-year-old, from Hanover, Ont., made a desperate attempt to stave off text-messaging disaster.
"I tried to hit it away from the toilet, but it just bounced off the rim before falling in," Soper said. "I didn't think. I grabbed it out."
In an age of instant e-mail and smartphones, it seems, dumb users are multiplying. And toilet bowls are swallowing cellphones with untethered regularity.
"You'd be surprised how many people drop it in the toilet," said Todd McLauchlin, with Prairie Mobile in Regina. "That's very common."
Flushing phones, however, is not the only way people find to inadvertently damage their mobile devices.
There was the woman who left her phone in a pair of pants that went through both the washer and dryer cycles. Another multi-tasker, who was texting and doing the dishes at the same time, saw hers nosedive into the sink full of suds.
The list goes on.
There's the guy who went swimming with the phone still in his trunks; the priest who dropped his into a pitcher of beer; or the sleepy man who one night grabbed his cell instead of a glass of water from his bedtable, then promptly dunked the phone in the glass.
Hapless users talk of phones that bobble from pockets to sidewalks - sometimes into puddles - during a sprint for the bus, while the butter-fingered have seen theirs end up under car tires, on subway tracks, in their breakfast cereal or morning cup of java.
Sebastien Charest, a technician with FirstComm Wireless in Ottawa, remembers one guy coming in with a plastic bag filled with cellphone bits. It had flipped from his hip as he cut the grass and the mower made short work of it.
McLauchlin recalls a fellow who brought in the remains of a phone crushed by a combine, while another young man working construction dropped his from scaffolding 12 storeys up.
"He brought all the pieces in," McLauchlin said. "We definitely couldn't do anything with it, though."
Sometimes, it is the call of the wild that's to blame for a phone's untimely demise.
Such was the case of the motorist who, perhaps driven crazy by yet another dropped call, peeled down his driver's side window and pitched the hapless device clear across the roadway.
Ivel Iraheta, 32, a job developer in Toronto, who calls flip phones his "nemesis," admits to destroying two in fits of pique.
"I was driving and all the traffic and everything was annoying me and I'm talking on the phone and I ended up getting mad and instead of hanging up the phone, I kind of just threw it down," Iraheta said.
"The other one actually I just threw against the wall -- I just got mad. That was at home in the living room. I was watching television. It's just so easy to (go), 'Arrghhh' --and toss them."
Andrei Ramanah, a technician with TechKnow Space in Toronto, has seen his share of abused mobiles.
"A woman brought hers - it was soaking with skin-tan lotion," Ramanah said. "I guess that happened on the beach."
While a mashed phone will never see last call again, technical gurus say all may not be lost if one does end up in the neighbourhood swimming pool, local cesspool or some other potentially watery grave.
The key, they advise, is to get the battery out immediately to avoid short circuits. The secondary danger is internal circuit corrosion, so it's essential to dry out the phone as quickly as possible, perhaps with the help of a blast of compressed air, a handy vent, or just bright sunshine.
Soper, with some TLC from a hair dryer, got his high-tech buddy back into pristine working order. His mother's phone -- which ended up with her in the Saugeen River when her canoe tipped - never did work quite properly again.
While there are no guarantees a drowned phone will recover, water damage is guaranteed to void warranties.
Fibbing about what happened likely won't help, either, experts say: A little white sticker, usually under the battery, turns red when it gets wet, so the service centre will know the phone's been swimming.
Technical experts say all may not be lost if your cellphone ends up drowning in a toilet bowl, swimming pool, or other watery destination. Some first aid tips:
- Retrieve phone as quickly as possible
- If still on, turn off. If off, leave off
- Remove battery immediately
- Dry off battery and outside of phone
- Use hair dryer, compressed air, an air vent or sunshine to dry out phone as quickly as possible
- Cross your fingers.
