Flushing Your Phone Away

from the who-knew? dept

Mon, Apr 4th 2005 2:14pm — Mike Masnick

Apparently, the the fact that mobile phones are so small and people carry them everywhere has meant that plumbers are finding big business in retrieving phones from toilets. While it does make you wonder what sort of request this reporter had to put out to find folks who would admit to dropping phones into toilets (sometimes more than once), it appears that more than a few people have sent their mobile phone swimming in the porcelain pool.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

6 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Oliver Wendell Jones, 4 Apr 2005 @ 2:34pm

It's not uncommon
My younger sister's friend bought a very fancy color cellphone and dropped it into the toilet less than 8 hours later and they would not replace it because it was "water damaged". He ended up forking out another $400+ to buy a second one just like it.

He left the ruined phone at my sister's place, and after a couple of weeks it dried out and spontaneously started working again - but noone wanted to hold it up to their face to talk on it...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
acousticiris, 5 Apr 2005 @ 6:45am

Happened to me with an old pager ...
It's actually not all that hard to see how that could happen.
I took the pager off, set it on top of the tank, proceeded to make use of the *ahem*facilities*ahem*, and left the bathroom sans pager.
Meanwhile, somewhere on the other side of town, I was being paged. My pager, being on vibrate went rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle-plunk.
Luckily, I flushed after using, so the bowl was "clean", but that still didn't make fishing it out of the bottom of the can any fun.
Also luckily, after taking it apart, letting it air-dry for the day, and putting it back together I found the pager worked just like before.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Ted Zlatanov, 5 Apr 2005 @ 7:29am

think of the children!
It's not always the adults that are at fault. Anyone with small children (I have a toddler) can tell you that phones and other objects WILL end up where they are not supposed to. Children are a force of nature.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Gerry, 6 Apr 2005 @ 2:04am

Re: think of the children!
"Force of nature" is so apt!

I have a Nokia N-gage QD that was a gift. Out of curiosity I measured the phone and the toilet sizes here (Singapore). I have to say that it would be quite hard to flush the N-gage away.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
saad, 3 Jun 2005 @ 5:49am

asdfg
sex666
[ link to this | view in thread ]
wirelessness, 16 Sep 2006 @ 1:10am

my goodness!!!
I just flushed it a few minutes ago and am here for advice... would you guys advice to talk to a plumber or whoever else controls the sewage system or just forget about all of the people in my phone book and start over with a new phone?
[ link to this | view in thread ]