Cell-phone revenge is a dish best served cold ... ice cold
By MIKE HENDRICKS
Columnist

Previous columns
Someone’s always trying to pick our pockets.

If it’s not some meatpacker injecting water into steaks and chops, it’s the oil companies scamming us with hot gas, as The Star revealed this week.

So when one of us scores one against the corporate sharks, it is cause for celebration.

This week, that’s what I’m doing.

I beat my cell-phone company out of hundreds of dollars — by sticking my cell phone in the refrigerator.

Yes, there atop a tub of cream cheese the little black beauty, sans battery, sat for a full 24 hours.

Every time I opened the refrigerator to grab a beer or a sandwich, I looked at it and thought, “Take that, you money-grubbers.

“Take your two-year contracts and your one-time activation fees and shove them in your earpiece.”

Did I mention the phone was broken?

“Water damage?” the saleswoman at the cell-phone store said disapprovingly when I told her I’d been caught in the rain.

The phone would turn on, but some of the numbers didn’t work. At times, it made odd beeping noises, like a Furby on crack.

After checking my account, she came back on the line.

“Sorry, sir, but you have no insurance on that phone, so I won’t be able to help you. You’ll need to buy a new phone.”

A new phone? Surely, there’s some way to fix it, I pleaded. But she insisted that was impossible.

Either I could go phoneless, and continue to pay the monthly fee under my contract.

Or I could buy a phone. The clunkiest model was $150, as I’d get no new-customer discount. While one exactly like mine was $300, more than twice what it cost me when I signed up.

I guess I could have filed a warranty claim and forgotten to mention that it had ever been drenched.

But it’s just as well I didn’t.

Behind the battery of most cell phones is a dot bigger than a pimple but smaller than a dime. It starts out white, but it turns red when it gets wet.

The result: Cell-phone companies make a ton selling replacement phones to people who stand out in the rain or drop their cell phones in the toilet or a swimming pool.

That could explain why inexpensive water-resistant watches have been around for decades, while these high-tech cell-phone manufacturers are seemingly incapable of similar technology.

Anyway, I didn’t like either of my options. Then I learned about a third they don’t tell you about at the cell-phone store.

On the Web, there’s a subculture of folks who share home remedies for sick cell phones.

Some swear a phone’s inner workings will dry out in the sun.

Others say hair dryers work best.

Whereas there are those who claim a wet cell phone can be restored by cooking it as one might a TV dinner.

In the oven at 125 degrees for five hours.

“This works about 90 percent of the time,” one cell-phone chef reports.

I didn’t particularly like those odds, so when the icebox method presented itself, I went for it.

And sure enough, it works!

If a refrigerator will dry out a block of cheese left unwrapped, it only stands to reason that it might also suck the moisture out of a wet cell phone.

Mine works like new now, so I pass along that tip should you fall in a lake with your cell phone this Labor Day weekend,