What to do when your cellphone gets wet

Once again, I’ve been given a lesson by the best teacher on earth – experience. And I’m sharing the lesson with others with the hope that you would be wiser and would know what to do in case what happened to me happened to you.

Last week, while checking in at Iloilo airport for the flight back to Manila, the mineral water in my bag spilled.The contents of my handbag all got wet, including my Blackberry phone.

It’s the same phone that I accidentally dropped in Southmall Supermarket December last year and was picked up by an honest janitor who returned it to me.

First lesson: Learn when to pay more and when to try to save money. I was not wise enough and it ruined my budget.
The reason the bottle of mineral got squeezed into my handbag was because I was trying to save money by not paying for the excess baggage. I had three pieces of baggage and I was in excess of 2.5 kilos.

The last box that contained green mangoes given by my aunt and suman sa ibos specially made by our neighbor using best quality malagkit weighed only a little over two kilos. I decided to just hand-carry it.

Since I already had my handbag and trolley luggage, I squeeze my handbag into the latter. Probably the bottle of mineral water was not tightly closed. My bag became a mini-lake.

I made the mistake of turning on my cellphone to find out if it was damaged. Wrong.

Upon arriving in Manila, I brought it to the cellphone repair shop. The repair guy said it’s severely damaged. I had to buy a new phone.

The ‘disaster’ led me to check online on what to do when it happens again. Here’s the one by Stacy Johnson in MSN Money ( www.msn.com).

What not to do:

1. Don’t turn it on. You’ll be tempted to see if the phone still works. Resist. Leave it off, or you may cause a short circuit. Do that and it’s game over.

2. No hair dryers. Blowing heat sounds smart, but there are two problems. First, the blown air may actually push droplets deeper inside the phone. Second, even on a low setting, a blow-dry may be too much heat for your phone to handle.

3. No sun. People have dried their laundry this way for centuries, but it’s not the way to dry a phone. Don’t leave it sitting in direct sunlight. It could bake.

4. No oven. This may sound crazy, but in researching this story we found people who actually tried it. Some even claim it worked, but we really don’t recommend it. Especially if the battery is carelessly left in, it could explode. Same deal with microwaves, which you should keep metal out of anyway.

What to do:

1. Turn the phone off. If possible, immediately power down the device. Water-damaged phones can act a little weird and may freeze up or keep cycling on and off. You want it to stay off, with no electrical activity, to protect the circuitry. If you have access to the battery, carefully remove it along with your SIM card.

2. Grab a towel. With a paper towel or whatever you have handy, do your best to wipe off visible moisture on both phone and battery.

3. Find some rice. You need uncooked rice and a sealed container. A large Ziploc bag will work, but a Tupperware container is best. Fill it up with rice, bury your phone, and then close it up. You’ll want to leave it alone at least overnight, although some repair sites recommend leaving it for a day or more.

4. Get a replacement while you wait. If a phone is vital and you don’t already have a backup, head to the store with your SIM card and see if you can get a cheap one to keep communications up and running, and to help you avoid the temptation of trying your phone before it’s fully dry.

5. Check and recharge. Once the waiting period is up, retrieve your device, and after making sure there’s no rice stuck inside, plug it in to charge and see what happens.

Other articles said let it dry for at least 24 hours.

In this day and age when cellphones have become part of your life, you feel disabled without one. Another lesson I’d like to share: don’t let it ruin your day. Cellphone lang yan.