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Where Has Your Cell Phone Been?
"Incident 1: A group of us were standing around the front desk after a meeting. The VP walks up (management are supplied with phones as well in case client calls get escalated) and someone says, 'I tried calling you last night but you weren't answering your cell phone.' The VP replies 'Yeah, my dog ate it!' Everyone laughed thinking it was a modern day take on the 'my dog ate my homework' story. Everyone laughed even harder when he reached into his pocket and pulled out a Ziploc bag full of small pieces of electronics and black plastic, handed it to the administrative assistant at the desk and said 'Please order me a new one.' His German Shepard saw the phone sitting on the coffee table and thought it would make a good chew toy.
Incident 2: While waiting for an important call from a client, one of the support guys was carrying the cell phone with him absolutely everywhere. The team leader knew this, and while he was on the phone with another client (on a speakerphone), he was surprised to see this support person come rushing into his cubicle without the cell phone. The team leader looked curiously at the support guy wondering what was going on and got a mumbled response:
'I flmsdd shll fdn dbn tlt.'
'You what?'
'I flushed the cell phone down the toilet!'
A burst of laughter came from the other end of the speakerphone, and the client says 'I think I'll call back later, it sounds like you've got your own problems.'
'How the h**l did you flush the cell phone down the toilet?', the team leader continues.
'Well, I was waiting for that important call to come in, and I had to go to the bathroom so I took the phone with me. When I finished, I stood up and flushed the toilet and heard a "plop". Looking down all I could see was the phone (a StarTac) swirling lower and lower in the bowl, then it was gone.'
The burst of laughter from the surrounding people was nothing compared to the laughter a few minutes later when the support person was crouched with his head over the toilet listening for the phone while the team leader dialed the number. Not being able to hear anything they counted the phone lost, and put in a requisition for a new one.
A couple of weeks later, no one was really surprised when a plumber had to be called in because one of the toilets kept backing up. Half an hour later the plumber left, leaving a tightly sealed bag containing a now black and brown cell phone at the front desk. The phone was proudly(?) displayed in the support person's office for several weeks afterward until one extremely brave co-worker took the phone home, and after a very thorough drying, cleaning and sterilization, replaced the battery and brought the once again working phone back to the office! . . . of course everyone still refused to use it."
Has been in my pocket, or on my desk. Pretty much those places when it's not in use (which is most of the time).
..you need to get a new cat. Yours is defective.
Ah... my dear loveable cell phones...
,flimsy belt clip, which snapped, sending the phone plunging into an aquarium.
#1 - Ericsson sh*tbox flip thingy. Faithful to the end.... end of its screwed on
#2 - Same as #1, only this one manifested a display glitch whereby you could only read the display if you were squeezing the phone in the right place. Many calls to American Tits & Twats later, I am issued phone #3...
#3 - Nokia 3360, the apeasement phone ("This guy is gonna ditch us if we dont give him a freebie"). Works fine, for about a week. Then the "No Service Weekends" start - you know, when AT&T service is free... From 8:30pm Friday until about 10 or 11 AM Monday the phone would read "NO SERVICE". No amount of arguing or grumbling would get AT&T to do anthing about it. This phone met an untimely demise at the hands of my car...
*CRUNCH* Oh my, I think I ran over something.... I will put it in reverse, back up and check....
*CRUNCH* Oh my, I think I backed over something... I will put it in first, drive forward and check...
Repeat 10 times, then dust the remnants of said phone into a baggie and dispose.
This brings us to phone #4 - Nextel i60 - So far still alive. We shall see...
People use to complain about how the old cell phones were too big and unreliable and how they wanted the "cute" new phone. They complained like this until one day, the phone lady stood up and screamed "If you don't shut up, I'll bash your head in with this old phone, then use it to call 911! How's that for unreliable? Can your (EXPLICIT REMOVED) "cute" little phone do that?
has to share a cell phone? I was kind of with you when you talked about tech people, but a company where a VP has to share a phone is... well, let's just hope your check clears next week.
Yes, but you forgot to mention that a large percentage of all cats you have ever known are defective.
That's almost like this one time at band camp!
What kind of backwater, podunk company doesn't have a rotating on-call list. It isn't 1992 anymore.
Kriston
I was working for a company in DC at the time, and we had an "EOC" phone. Engineer on call got passed the phone and had to keep it for a week. We were a 24-7 shop so no matter what shift you worked, you'd get your turn in hell. It was the worst for the monday-friday guys that worked the 4-12 shift because they'd invariably forget they couldn't get loaded on friday and expect to do anything useful early saturday morning. Of course that's when the call would come. 6 or 7am saturday morning. So I had it worse than any of these guys because as their manager, I had to be at work every single day for about 14 hours because I had inherited a HUGE mess from the previous tech manager (two months of redhat and he was a UNIX expert). Against the wishes of just about everyone, someone had put new code into production on a friday. Of course it bombed and completely hosed the backup system, as well as push the load on a very important machine to the point that it was completely unresponsive. So I'm doing my usual drive to work at 6am heading around the beltway. I get a phonecall and I can see it's the EOC phone. I flip the startac open and it's our pissed off, still half drunk EOC telling me that he needs me to put the fear of God into a support guy that refuses to try to use a serial cable to console into the sick machine. So we do a conference call. My EOC is completely pissed and just keeps getting worse. The support guy is complaining that he doesn't understand, and that he can't get ahold of his boss for permission. I explain that it's critical. The EOC is saying that he's driving in and about 30 minutes away and it would be great if he only had to deal with fixing the backups and how important it was to have this customer visible machine back up and running as soon as possible. I'm echoing what the EOC is saying and thinking to myself, yanno, I'm only about 30 minutes away. The EOC keeps getting more and more pissed. About this time a car speeds by me in the outside lane and that's when I hear the crackle on the line and pieces of nokia rain down all over my car. I probably would have been a huge dick about it if I hadn't been listening to the call.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Prett simple story, I had gone to the gym which was accross the parking lot from where I worked on base. I left my cell phone in the back pocket of my gym bag, with my deoderant, in my car. Then I walked to work. Little did I know solid white deoderant melted (see, there's the stupid part). Mix that in with the car windows up on a very hot day and I ended up with a startac filled with nice smelling goo (the car smelled good too). Washing, drying, and even a disasembly attempt were no good. I ended up with a new samsung. I'm just glad the phone was old and it was time for an upgrade anyway.
Feel free to make fun of me for this, all my friends did.
Most of my phones end up in the lake. Fisrt time it was in my pocket when I fell overboard. The canoe was unstable, I realized it was going and jumped before the entire canoe went.. Overall I lost less than if the contents of the canoe went down, but the phone didn't survive.
Next one I put in a ziplock bag in the waterproof compartment of my jetski, but when I arrived at my destination the phone was wet. Never worked again.
Yeah I've seen the sites on how to care for a phone that falls overboard, but they didn't work, at least not for me.
My phone has gone through hell and back.. and it keeps on going..
:> Thing still works great, unless you count how quiet it is.. but that's because it lives in my pocket and the speaker is full of lint...
I've...
Dropped it 2 stories onto the steel deck of a boat MULTIPLE times on different occasions(fell out of pocket as I was leaning over a railing)..
Dropped it into puddles..
Exposed it go through chemicals galore..
Gotten it hooked up on stuff as I ran by(was in my pocket)
I can't even remember what else I've done to it..
Cheers!
Just think about this for a minute (if you have females in your group):
The woman gets called at 2 am. She handles the call and can't go back to sleep. She is single or hubby/bf is either out of town or in deep slumber...
She tries to go back to sleep and can't. She needs some clitoral stimulation to relax her to go back to sleep. Then she realizes that the batteries of vibrator died. Then she looks around and notices the cell phone in addition to the cordless landline phone. And yeah, THE CELL PHONE HAS VIBRATE MODE !!
You figure the rest cause you might be using the phone next....
So lets see , there's been phones:
- Run over by 290 ton dump trucks. Phone? What phone?
- Dropped into various parts of an operating washplant (all ending with at least a 12 inch inlet impellor pump running at 2000RPM waiting for the phone)
- Dropped down 70 meter boreholes and then subsequently blasted to bits when said boreholes are charged with explosive and fired. (From memory in this case, they dropped about a cubic metre of dirt back down the hole to seperate phone from explosive before charging the hole.)
Try explaining *those* accidents to your boss.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
A nice little Motorola. Put through the wash once (I'm sure I'm not the first that's happened to), but it survived. About a month later, I could no longer SMS text - only numbers. I'm not sure if that was related to the wash incident.
A few months after that, I was stupid and drunk enough to lend the phone to a friend who was drunk and stupid enough to have lost one phone that night already. He managed to get his back the next day.
I can't claim to really miss my old phone that much. If someone needs to contact me in reasonable hours, I'll be at my office phone or there'll be someone there to take a message. If I'm at home, likewise. Remember when life was simple?
Refuse to make a statement in your sig!
Ive put my poor phone though a fair bit, been dropped off a 2 storey balcony, been swimming in the pool, but it was actually a swim in scotch and coke that killed it in the end :/
What kind of company is this? Don't people take care of their crap? If it had been any place I worked, you'd have had to buy the company a new one. It seems strange to give people rotating cell phones when alpha-pagers would have done the job and cheaper.
I remember seeing that episode of Jackass. Or was it a toy car? I can't remember.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
1. Dropped off a high rise construction, about 20 stories down.
2. Ran over by a D9 Cat at same high rise construnction
3. Two words, washing machine
4. Left at Olive Garden. Guy that found it did not want to give it back and would argue with anyone that called it.
5. I now have a pager. Company wont issue me anymore cell phones, and here is the kicker, I WORK for a wireless company!
www.linux-skunkworks.com
I used to have a Nokia 8290. TINY little phone. I came home from work to change clothes becaus I had been climbing around on rooftops setting up a 802.11b building to building wireless network. So I was in a rush to change/shower and get back to work. I threw me dirty clothes in the dryer and left to work. Once I got back to work and went to search for my cellphone because I used it to keep all my contacts, I realized it was missing. Then I realized where it was! It was probably mid spin cycle at home! So I left work and rushed home to see if I could save the phone. It was SOAKED, but very clean now. I took the thing apart.. every little peice. dried them off with a towel and let them lay on the counter top for a few days.. I put the sim card in my backup phone, a Nokia 3390, and it worked just fine.. I hated that 3390! There is no "Decline call" option when someone is calling you.. All you can do is turn off the phone! Anyways.. 3 days later I reassembled the 8290, swaped the sim card back into it.. and it worked just fine. Very clean too. This was 2 years ago and the phone is still in operation. A friend of mine has it now.
Microsoft Windows runs on stress and frustration.
I have been with my company for over 5 years now. I started when I was 18 as an entry level markup engineer and worked my way up. About a year after I started I moved into a position which required me to be on call (pretty much 24/7). At that time I got a company phone (a Nextel). Upon receiving it, I decided that I didn't want to carry around my personal phone anymore (with the company phone) so I cancelled it and started using my work phone for everything. I had that phone for just over a year (breaking two and getting replacements) when my boss called me into his office. He told me that our VP had called him that morning and instructed him to take my phone away. Shocked, I asked him why? I would seem that we were on a 600 minute per phone plan and I had been over 3000 minutes for the three preceding months. Not only that, but my usage had been close to 4 time that of the next highest person in Operation. All I could really say was ... "Oops!"
The interesting thing is, now, four years later, I am getting a new phone company. It should be delivered any day now. And for some reason, there is still a 600 minute plan (although we are with Sprint). Anyway, I think this time I am going to be a bit more careful and keep my personal phone.
-- [Sig] Rome did not create a great empire by negotiation; They did it by killing everyone who opposed them.
It was a toy car, and it was the movie.
I worked as a consultant for a big big big bank. I was nominally in a team of 4 people--one was busy being a manager, one didn't do f***-all, one was usually too busy with wife & kids (ok I accept that one) and one preferred to spend his time playing with new tech. So, being the only contractor, it fell to me to get shit done.
Even though we had an on-call rota system, where our landline hotline number was forwarded to the company cell of whoever was on call that week, I inevitably ended up being called in, often very drunk, to fix problems that weren't my problem. Firewall issue? Call the firewall guys. Database issue? Call the firewall guys. Company web server dead? Call the firewall guys. Aunt Edna's refrigerator won't defrost? Call the firewall guys.
It got to the point where my colleagues would forward calls from the company's _customers_ to me. Once, on top of a very very high mountain, once on another continent, once while getting busy (no I didn't pick it up, but as a helpful tip, always turn off the mobile when you're with your girlfriend. Few things are more of a mood-killer than 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' as a Nokia ringtone when things get hot and heavy.)
So, finally, one day, I managed to get reservations at the most difficult-to-get-into restaurant in town, and just as we'd ordered our drinks, the fucking phone rings. Support issue from one of the unix idiots, and I'm not even on call. All the other guys are several hundred miles away and can't dial in (including the EOC.) So, I take a few deep breaths, tell the maitre d' we'd be back, and THROW THE FUCKING PHONE AS HARD AS I CAN AND STEP ON IT AND JUMP AND SCREAM INSULTS AT IT argh argh argh! You know the feeling, when things like that just sort of come to a head? That's the one.
Official version, "a cab ran over it." Despite the footprints on what was left of the display. Nobody ever asked about it, since that would have cost them a lot of goodwill from the only guy willing to drive crosstown at 3 a.m. after several pints to fix their trading system, while not on the call rota.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
im sure telecom where i work has heard it all since we use over 40,000 pagers. i am not exactly sure about the number of cell phones because they arnt used quite like we use the pagers. A stupid story though im sure is a lot better then people who ruin them by being just flat out wreckless dropping them. I havent done anything horible to my pager or any of my work equipment but i have heard of guys dropping their nerd pack (1 pair of scisors, 1) punch down tool, 1) screw driver, 1) flashlight) in the toilet and fishing them out..
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
I do not believe that no one has submitted this yet, but this should definitely be mentioned. Check Item #3 under "SOME MORE ALSO RAN".
Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.
I take a cellphone out windsurfing (incase something breaks and I need to call for help). Of course the AquaPac split and drowned my Nokia 7110 - took it apart and dunked it in fresh water to wash the salt off it and it all worked again.
:)
:)
:)
Since then the phone has been drowned so many times by rain, etc and still won't die.
Having said that, one of my colleagues put his Ericson phone and wallet on the deck of a ZapCat powerboat and then immediately helped to launch the thing. Only realised what he had done when he saw the crew waving his dripping phone and wallet at him (the phone never did survive that
I think pretty much all of us here at work have drowned at least one phone in the sea at some point.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
His German Shepard saw the phone sitting on the coffee table and thought it would make a good chew toy.
:o)
The coffee table, or the cell phone?
True story - I have a border collie (picture here for the curious) - when he was about 5 months old, we woke up one morning to discover the plastic coffee table strewn, in very tiny bits, across the living room.. Boomer had decided that night that hard plastic tasted good, and proceeded to attempt to eat it..
We took him to daycare that day, and when we went to pick him up, the owners brought out a plastic bag, and showed us his stool.. they were very concerned, because he'd been pooping out bits of hard plastic all day..
Oblique UCB reference...
A guy I work with dropped his phone and PDA in a urinal. I lost track of how many times he washed them.
One where they want to keep the same number for support, but have a rotating support person?
It's not really any different from a lot of companies that have a tech-on-call. Sometimes you have rotating tech-support shifts, but if you just pass the phone over at least the numbers that one has to call don't change.
In the nearby large city, I heard they were having some problems with this. Apparently young couples with cellphones would experiment with the vibe feature, but some actually have the cellphone vibrate itself out of reach.
Buzzz...oh...oH...OH...pop and it's gone
Several embarrassed females/couples ended up in hospitals to have a doctor remove "lost" cellphones.
I went hiking with a friend and my dog, and decided to put the cell in the dog's pack (little pack - she carries her food, water, and mat) so it would be easily accessible if we needed it (I was carrying a hundred pounds in my honkin' internal frame pack that's not so easy to pick up once it's down.)
Well, let me tell you about Labs and water. We came upon a stream, and in went the dog, pack, and cellphone.
From now on, she carries only waterproof gear.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The best solution is to have a portable number. That way you just point the number to a different location each night. I really would not want to bring a phone other people use home. Most portable numbers let you change the destination with call on via the web.
My ex-girlfriend hit me over the head with my Nokia 6210 shrieking "you dirty cocksucker!" before she threw it at my face though she missed and it whizzed by my left ear hitting the wall. Now the display doesn't work anymore. Too bad the Nokia 6210 was a pretty neat phone, I had a far more meaningful relationship with that phone instead of with her in the end :-)
I haven't had any stories with the cell phone, but one woman on our team did accidentally flush the shared pager for the team down the toilet exactly as described above. It was one of those little mysteries about being on-call: "Where has this pager been?" I'm best off not knowing.
We got a new pager, one of my weeks of being on-call, I had the pager on the kitchen counter. Next morning, I couldn't find the pager! I was late for work, cursing, and tearing the place apart to find the pager. I checked to make sure the doors were locked, wondering whether I had aliens visit the night before--or mischievous elves--and thought seriously about getting checked out for senile dementia.
Eventually, I had to give up and go to work without it. Then, during the day, I realized that the pager had been set to "vibrate" by the DBA who had it the week before. When I got home, I looked in the trash which was located about four feet from where I had left the pager next to the counter. Yep, the pager had gone off, "walked" across the counter, and dropped in the trash.
I actually did this with my girlfriend once when the support pager went off in the middle of sex.
I stopped using the "On-Call" phone immediately after this frightfull discovery. Arriving at work one Monday morning, after a rather large mug full of coffee, I made a most neccesary trip to the facilities. To my dismay the door was locked and strange grunting noises were eminating from within. Curiosity bested me and despite the urge to laugh histerically I listened further. A lull in the action was interupted by a loud plop followed by a littany of curses. Unable to control the urge to laugh histerically I retreated to my office. Soon after I regained my composure a co-worker delivered to me the "On-Call" phone along with an apology for getting it wet. No spcifics were given nor asked for. I now have all after hours support calls routed to my own phone.
My Dad used to put his pager into a non-lube condom and tie a knot in the end and take that out in our sailing dinghy (which occasionally tipped over and was certainly wet on a rough day).
That was reliable, waterproof, salt proof, but didn't solve the problem of what to do if it went off.
Eventually he would leave it unwrapped with the Club Race Control Tower back on shore, knowing they could send a rescue jet-boat out to get him if it went off.
'course it never went off while we were on the water and I (crew) never had to sail the boat back in by myself. I guess he'd briefed the resident doctors about what he was doing and when he'd be available. And you wonder why the wait is long in the emergency ward.
I keep my battered old StarTAC in a belt clip holster.
One day, I was wearing a turtleneck sweater which had built up a significant static charge. I went into a toilet stall to remove it to dissipate the charge. As I took off my sweater, I nudged the StarTAC hard enough to send it flying out of the holster. The poor phone flipped open in midair, before landing -plop!- in the commode. I watched as the screen went dark underwater.
Shocked (by my stupidity, not the sweater) I steeled myself and retrieved the phone. I wrapped it in paper towels, washed my hands three times, and took it home.
Once home, I put on some latex gloves, took out the phone, and removed the battery. I blasted it with compressed air to get out all the water I could. I slathered it thoroughly with rubbing alcohol, sprayed it with Lysol, swabbed it with alcohol again, and left it on the counter for 48 hours.
When I pushed PWR, it started right up. Still works just fine.