what i might have known if i hadn't quit reading the bible

Friends of the blog will recall that my church was involved in a year-long Bible reading project last year, and faithful readers will still be disappointed that I got behind and quit reading in April, somewhere around the life of David.

Apparently if I'd stuck to project 4:4 long enough to get to Proverbs, I could have saved myself a heap of trouble this week.  Last night I posted a self-congratulatory description of my handiness and a recounting of the disassembling, repair, and reassembling of my phone.  Once I got the phone all back together I received and sent texts, played Angry Birds, and checked my email.  Everything was running in tip-top shape, and I was more than a little smug about my triumph over one more mechanical piece of my life . . . until this morning when my pride went-eth before destruction.

I was trying to call in to work to warn them about how massively I had overslept and how that would affect my arrival time, but every time I hit the speed dial, I couldn't hear the phone ringing or anyone picking up.  A couple of times when I tried, the screen went black.  I was attempting to drive down the road at the time, so I didn't do too careful an examination, but I knew that wasn't a good thing.  I supposed that I had put the internal earpiece in backwards, as it had been a tricky thing last night.  My earpiece didn't look exactly like the one in the video, so when it came time to reassemble, I could figure out which side was up.  The piece fit into the hole in four different ways, so I chose the one that seemed to make the most sense.  Clearly that wasn't it.

I did discover that if I could put the phone on speaker that I was still able to talk on it, but I determined that when I got home tonight, I would take the phone apart once more and flip the earpiece.  This was mildly inconvenient for today, but I was still quite confident in my ability to get everything back in working order.  But my haughty spirit was about to meet its (down)fall.

I don't remember if I mentioned this last night, but a few of those pieces were clearly not intended to be popped in and out of place repeatedly, so I knew doing another invasive procedure on my phone could be dangerous.  I opened the phone (which I can do completely without the instructional video by this point) and flipped the piece in question and had to put the whole phone back together before I could power it up to try a call.  Jess was my lovely assistant for this portion of the project.  Even with the earpiece flipped, I couldn't hear anything, and the screen-going-black thing happened each time I tried to call, making it impossible to turn on the speaker phone. 

So I cracked the phone open once more to try the piece another way.  Same song, third verse.  I took a break (to avoid throwing the phone across the room) and looked up the prices of phones on ebay.  Eventually I attempted to make it work one final time.  At this point, I've cracked one of the plastic pieces near the power button/earpiece area, and I still can't hear anything through the normal earpiece.  Sometimes when I attempt to make a call, it goes to a black screen and only starts to respond again when it feels like it, and other times when I try, the screen acts just as I should, and I can put the phone on speaker. 

Clearly I can't function this way indefinitely.  The point of a phone is still to be able to call people, despite what may or may not be my addiction to Angry Birds.  If everyone in the world would just agree to text-only communication, this would be fine, but I'm related to most of the texting holdouts in the world, so that's just not going to work.  If I hadn't lost my charger to the old phone back in January, none of this would have ever happened.  In the meantime, I guess I'll charge up the old phone in the car and switch the sim card over to it when I'm out and about anyway.  But since my delightful couple of months with new phone has ruined me, I'll probably end up on ebay working on a replacement.

Stupid pride, stupid thinking I can fix things, stupid broken phone.  I know there are problems in the world far greater than the tiny potatoes of my phone, so I'll stop whining about this now.   But I urge my imaginary readers to learn from this cautionary tale.  Don't be dumb enough to think that a couple of tiny screwdrivers and a youtube video can turn you into a phone mechanic.  Nothing but trouble down that road.  Remember Proverbs and save yourself from heartache.

Three final disjointed bits of information:

1.  Someday I'm going to be sorry about wasting this particularly awesome blog title on this whiny, rambling post. 

2.  I had really interesting stuff planned for the blog this week, but the real-time drama of my broken phone has consumed us.  Sorry for that.  Someday soon you're going to see a particularly exciting completed craft project, read an insightful and poignant description of my spiritual growth during the Lenten season, and experience the most perfect batch of poetry ever.  Now I know you're dying for me to shut up about my phone and bring the awesome.

3.  If you need to communicate information to me in the next few days, might I suggest email? I haven't gotten around to dismantling my laptop yet, so it should be safe.