Yes, I know. You just read the title to this post and you gave a shudder. Well let me ruin the ending for you now, and say, my iPhone has fortunately returned to its normal self, and has climbed a few rungs of respect in my book.

Yesterday, after returning from scuba diving down at the Scuba Shack, I was carrying a tub upstairs that had our still moist buoyancy compensators upstairs from the car. Still wearing my swim trunks, I didn’t have any good pockets, so I placed my wallet, keys and phone on top of the BCs. After getting upstairs, I started to take the BCs out of the tub, forgetting that all my usual pocket trinkets were still sitting on top. Needless to say… they took a dive. There were a few inches of water that had accumulated at the bottom of the tub from the BCs, just enough to fully submerge the iPhone.

Panic!

I nearly dove into the 2 inches of water after the phone, taking it out, carefully examining it. I took the plastic case I have off of it, and dried it off as best I could with my shirt. Luckily the phone was still on, however, I was getting the famed “The inserted device is not recognized”, meaning the phone thought something was plugged into the headphones, but I the only possible plugged in device… was water. Oh no! So this meant that no sound was coming out of the speakers because it thought I was trying to plug something into the headphone socket.

I took a hair drier briefly to the iPhone. No luck. So I kept the phone off, took out the SIM card, put it in my pocket and went on my way.

About 5 hours later, I took the phone out again, which had been turned back on from being in my pocket. I slid to unlock and I heard the magical sound of the iPhone click. The sound works! I was very excited. So I took the SIM card out of my pocket and put it back in the phone. In all my excitement, however, I had forgotten that the SIM card goes in a tray. That’s right, I just stuck it way down into the phone. Far from the reach of a paperclip. And only later, when talking with my roommate, did the thought even cross my mind to use tweezers… eh.

So I went to iFixIt and went to town on getting the iPhone apart. I was over at my girlfriend, Melissa’s, parents house at the time, and through group effort, we were able to get the screen off. Bingo! The SIM card was right there and I was able to push it out just fine. Against all my curiosity I put the phone back together, put the SIM card in its tray and slid it in. The phone seemed fine. It wanted to be activated through iTunes again, but that was ok. After a quick drive home, sync with the computer, my iPhone has an even strong place in my heart.

PS. If you are an Apple repair technician about to tell me I voided my warranty, let’s go with that I made this entire post up in a moment of creative and imaginative genius. Thanks.