How to save a life. Tales from the digital world.

Please note that slight hyperboles were used to highlight the arguments used to make a point.

Recently my iPhone fell from my pocket and decided to bathe in the toilet for a couple of seconds. I heroically (or so I felt) took it out and wiped it on a towel. I shouted “RICE, TAKE OUT THE RICE!” at my boyfriend, who was surely at least slightly confused about my 2 a.m. rice craving.

Tales from the ER: Code Blue

I went into the kitchen and a pile of rice was waiting on the table. I put the phone in, turned it off immediately, then took my second phone and googled “iphone fell into toilet”. In my panic state, I opened the first link, then gave the phone to my boyfriend and asked him to read what to do. In the meantime, I was pampering my wet phone almost as if I was holding the hands of a moribund person. I was ready to perform CPR on that phone, if that would have kept it alive. I felt that every minute counted, and a bad move could ruin my poor iPhone forever.

I carefully took some tips from the internet and mixed them with my own “how to save a phone from water damage” know-how. I shook the iphone to remove the excess water, I put it back in rice, in a sealable bag, and placed the bag close to a heater. There was nothing more I could do. My phone was in a coma, and at that stage, I was not sure it would ever wake up again.

Tales of the absurd: Rescue Me Delirium

The world was spinning around me, and I was feeling weaker and weaker. I had done the last backup half a year ago, so if the phone was truly dead, I would have lost thousands of photos. That made me feel as if the memories those thousands of photos had captured would simply fade away with a phone that would no longer turn itself on.

Ridiculous thoughts (as I now realize they were) such as “how will I post on Instagram tomorrow” crossed my mind. Not for one second did I think about the fact that I would not be able to call or text. Most of my friends and family have iPhones, and Apple’s iMessage works just fine without the phone, when you also own a Mac. I felt as if someone took away the bottle of alcohol from an alcoholic. Not that I didn’t have a second phone, but hey, it was not an iPhone 6, but an iPhone 5. And how could I possibly downgrade the quality of the photos I was posting on Instagram!?

Tales from Med School: First Aid for Tech Geeks

A couple of years ago I spilled a glass of water on my Dad’s computer as he was making an online payment. He quickly wiped it, then continued to process his transaction, while I shouted “turn it off, put it upside down, and in rice!”.

We, the tech savvy generations, are born doctors. We fix, reboot, erase and reinstall. We take out parts, we replace them. We almost always know what to do and when to do it. And if we no longer know what to do, we take our devices and gadgets to Geniuses who fix or replace them.

My iPhone was fine, as you can presume. As a matter of fact, I acted so quickly that, even though fully immersed in water, its water damage indicator is still intact. I knew just what to do, and, even though panicked, I could still keep myself focused to do the right thing.

While assessing the success of my (ironically said) heroic medical endeavour with my iPhone, I started questioning my ability to save an actual human being. Then I remembered the one time I was needed to help someone in need: I had freaked out and almost fainted. And when I think about the first aid course we all did in school, I can remember all the joking that was involved (especially when we had to act like we were performing CPR on each other), but not much of the actual steps.

I do think that a vast majority of us would not know what to do in a real medical crisis, but there’s something we all know: to google it…

January 2016