Believe it or not, the previous two parts of this article (here is Part 1) did not cover all of our friends' broken device debacles. Perhaps this is because we have a lot of friends, or – what's more likely – our friends find themselves heading to the cell phone repair shop more frequently than most. But this isn't their fault. It's simply that our buddies lead active lives, and a life of constant activity means a heightened risk of dropping, soaking, running over or otherwise breaking your mobile device. Few things are more irritating than an afternoon spent at an Apple Store or Samsung repair center shelling out big bucks to solve a calamity that you could have prevented. In order to keep you from landing in a similar situation as our friends, we present more anecdotes illustrating the technological price paid for human folly. Learn from these peoples' mistakes before making the same ones yourself.
- Choose your cases wisely. The world of cellphone cases is a vast one, and with myriad options available, it may be tempting to most consumers to go for the cheapest one. However, those willing to lay down some green will be pleased with their options, such as the LifeProof Fre RealTree, which according to CNET is waterproof. But a female friend from Chicago learned the hard way that buying a good iPhone case is, in fact, a worthwhile investment. Before this incident, the woman was a self-admitted superficial case person. Instead of choosing a shell that was made to handle the various curve balls life can throw your way, she put down a few bills for a pretty-looking encasement. It was a decision she would come to regret one blustery winter morning when thumbing her coat for gloves. Instead of finding the gloves, though, her hands came in contact with her iPhone, before sending it plummeting to the floor. As it fell onto the sidewalk, the phone's case did absolutely nothing to prevent its immediate shattering. Yet as a seeming testament to the robust nature of Apple's product line, the device kept working, even as it would periodically deposit little bits of glass in her fingers. Eventually, the iPhone timed out altogether, but one has to give it credit for its resilience.
- An unconventional approach to washing one's phone. A Chicago friend told us about his two month-old cellphone that met an untimely demise at the hands – or rather, the suds – of the house washing machine. The disaster happened because the man's wife mistakenly put it in the machine for a good old fashioned deep rinse. Unfortunately, cellphones should be cleaned a little differently than your average article of knitwear, and the man found himself without a phone.
- All around brutalizing computing devices. Maybe there's something in the water over on the west coast. What else can explain why our San Francisco buddy not only dropped his laptop on the ground, but also accidentally ran over the charger, rendering it almost unusable unless it was plugged in at a very specific angle. Nobody said it was easy to manage computing devices, and for our friend, it proved to be one of life's great challenges.
- Chicken roast goes awry. Ah, the beauty of a Sunday. A day all to yourself, free from the pressures of work, the hassle of daily transport and the frequent recourse to that overpriced vending machine. Sunday is a day of rest, but it is also a day of gourmet cooking. And what could be more of an American staple to cook than a juicy chicken in the oven? Unfortunately, for our other San Francisco-based friend, what started as one such good Sunday ended decidedly worse. Even though he planned to stay indoors to roast his chicken, our buddy wore his Sunday best: a crisp button-up shirt, replete with a series of front pockets. It was into one such pocket that the man had slipped his cellphone, so that he would not have to experience a single moment of boredom while waiting for the meat to reach optimal crispness. In between sending out a flurry of texts, he'd open the oven and check on the chicken, prodding it to see how it was doing. Can you see what's going to happen? You guessed it – as he was bending over to check the tenderness of his roast, his phone managed to catapult out of his pocket and all the way to the back of the oven, making a quick retrieval impossible. He scrambled to clear all the food out of the way, reached deep into the belly of the beast and grabbed his device. Fortunately, unlike our female Chicago friend, this dude did have a good cell phone case, and although it melted, it carried out its duty and kept the phone safe.