I placed the magazines on the chair, the phone on the magazines, and then got into the pool. I grabbed the magazines to give them a read and PLOOP goes the month-old iPhone 4 into the pool, making a beeline towards the bottom. I frantically swipe at it to get it out as soon as possible; it’s probably in there for no more than 4 seconds or so.

The phone takes this opportunity to turn itself on (!!!) and start complaining about incompatible accessories. Try to turn it off, it turns itself back on. There’s no yanking out the battery. All one can do is shake the water out of it, use a hair dryer to blow it with cold air, and wait.

It’s been about 20 hours now and the phone seems to be behaving after some TLC. It drained the battery on its own, probably because of the constant rebooting. I gave it a charge this morning and it was able to turn on and pull my mail, but wasn’t running any apps… so when I went into Facebook, for example, the screen would blink and then drop back to the home page. I uninstalled and reinstalled all the apps and now everything appears to be back to normal. I’m leaving it off most of the day for some additional drying time.

I’m so absurdly careful with the phone that it’s almost comical that this happened. It’s as if the amount of care you exercise is directly proportional to the probability of something catastrophic happening, instead of being indirectly proportional.