1. Wisdom often comes from failure.

Happy hour mishap:

On Thursday night husband and I hit our usual 4-7 happy hour. It is great. They give you free appetizers, like a huge plate of all sorts of artery clogging delicacies to keep you full so that you can consume more booze, which is how restaurants make money. duh.

So after a few pitchers, and a shot or two or three, we decided “it was on” so we headed to our second favorite happy hour, er, day: $2.00 Tecate -or- $5.00 for a shot of Tequila + 1 Tecate, every Thursday. Yes, the ENTIRE DAY. You just cannot go wrong here people. I used to live across the street, so I know. Anyway, we were ordering the $5.00 special on repeat, babbling to anyone within ears range who would listen and purposely selecting obnoxious music on the Jukebox… at some point, I got up to go play a song and I left my Blackberry sitting on the bar unsupervised. BAD IDEA. I walked back to my seat at the bar and found it drenched, in what I assumed was “water” (clear case of DENIAL). I immediately pulled out the battery and held my breath and took a shot of Tequila.

Without thinking, because I was having a terrible time focusing at this point, I did the dumbest move ever….I put the battery BACK in and started it up. (GASP). Well the display came on for like 30 seconds and “vjeeewwwmm“, goes blank.

This is where the being poor bit comes into play because if I were just able to toss away $300 bucks to purchase another four year old phone (thanks for keeping up with the times Verizon – you SUCK!), this wouldn’t be such a critical situation. But I am not in that position today, therefore things were really not looking good for me in the communications department.

I tried to reboot it again in the AM because my alarm went off, which I thought was a good sign. Unfortunately, it was the only thing that my phone could do anymore, (and it went off an hour fucking early).

What.To.Do.Now. Well, again, a person with the ability to run out and buy another one would just pull out the media storage device and go pick up a replacement without even thinking about it. Me, on the other hand, sat up, nearly gagged from the horsey Tequila taste in my mouth, and said to myself: “I am gonna fix this fucker, game on”…and so the mission began.

Later that morning I met up with my best friend Google and started reading through post after post on various forums about what a girl should do in my situation… so I got a good idea of what I needed to do first, which was remove the fucking battery and don’t even think about putting it back in for like a week. Hi.

Next, I got out my old blackberry…well, same model, different provider, and took it apart so that I could use out spare parts out of it if I needed to. Which I did. Yeah, I don’t know if you remember a while back when I was bitching and moaning about how I got sand into the ear piece of my phone? Well, whenever I got a call, it sounded like “muh mwa muh mwa” – similar to the adult characters in a Peanuts (Snoopy) cartoon, so I took this opportunity to swap out earpiece.

Anyway, before I started to dissect my current phone, I threw impatience out with the baby and stuck it in a container of rice next to the heat lamp in my turtles aquarium. Apparently, the rice absorbs moisture and the heat, well, it’s heat. I left it there yesterday and over night (last night) and this morning I jumped out of bed, powered up, and guess the fuck what!? Not only did it boot, but the keyboard lit up, the ringer worked, I was getting calls/emails/texts, I could see a faint display, and I could even make a call! And you know what’s even MORE better than that?! THE EAR PIECE I PUT IN WORKED! I nearly shit myself. I could hear! Not mumbling, no Peanuts… I felt like even though the display was still fucked, I had made huge progress in my life as a Blackberry Specialist.

** I should mention that upon opening up the casing to my phone… a not-so-shocking observation was made along with the discovery of nearly an inch of sand and a seahorse carcass: the liquid that I thought was “water” smelled a LOT like Tecate, you know “beer water”.

Alright, so now I had to address the display issue. I swapped LCD’s from one BB to the other and it did not do the trick. I tested the “busted” one out on my spare parts phone and it worked just fine, so the back-light issue had nothing to do with the display itself. I took out the motherboard and gently wiped off the connectors, thinking that if anything was corroded or stuck it would some loose (I fixed my laptop this way). No luck there either. So I disconnected the LCD display, wrapped the motherfuckerboard in a paper towel and buried it in rice. Fingers crossed. We will see what happens in a few days. Worse case scenario, I have a phone with a dim ass display until December when the new BB comes out (no display no bee-jay). Best case scenario, I am still a total loser, but a bad ass because I fixed it.

and there is a number 2, in addition to the number 1:

2. You don’t waste any time pussy-footing around with ant baits, traps and/or toxic sprays. You put your pink kitchen gloves on, you go straight to the colony and then you kill the colony…which is what I did today. Me: 1, Pests: 0, Husband: 0, Pest Control Man: 0, Raid: 0.

OH, and p.s It DOES look like Camarades banned me again, for god knows what now. I am kind of over it, they have no clue what they are doing and the TECHNOLOGY IS DEAD…time to move on ho-bags. I will let you know where I end up. Suckas.

Please keep my phone in your prayers. TY

CL