The Rice Method

Rain outside my office window

It's raining. It rained yesterday. And maybe the day before that. I'm not really sure at this point because the soggy, boggy days are all running together (pun mostly intended).

During a break in the clouds yesterday, I went for a 5-miler. Steps from my house, the heavens opened and rain deluged down in big, hard, plopping drops that soaked me cap-à-pie. I embraced the raindrops and kept slogging.

Sadly, my iPhone also embraced the rain . . . right in its top speaker, so when I returned home an hour later, I could receive calls but could not hear the other person talking at all. Sadness.

So I did what any responsible reader of Internet wisdom would do: I put my phone in rice. Brown rice in a Rubbermaid container. I waited five minutes for the rice to work its magical rice powers before I asked my son to call me to see if I could hear anything yet. I couldn't. I waited 30 more minutes and had him try again. Still nothing. At this point this darling teenager said, "Ya know, Mom, you could maybe wait overnight or something." Right.

So I carried my little Rubbermaid with me to a friend's house later that evening. I checked on my phone often. Sure, I could receive texts, a strange glow would emanate from the brown rice and the bowl would buzz. But then, dear reader (not to be whatever the antithesis of a spoiler is—an anti-spoiler?), the sun broke through: Some 10 hours after placing my phone in brown rice, I successfully took a call. Ta-da! I now have firsthand, conclusive, empirical data confirming this method of iPhone resuscitation using brown rice. Next time I'm gonna try Basmati.