Cell Deathwatch
by Brian Hioe
While traveling in Austria a few weeks ago, I was staring at my phone as I walked; I tripped, fell, and managed to drop the phone in a small stream. Admittedly, I had decided to take a walk in the cool night to sober up, because I was drunk, but failed to notice the nearby stream. Before I knew it, the phone had washed away!
“Oh no!” I thought, with a sense of inevitability. I had already had some premonition that I would lose or destroy my phone during my two-week journey through Europe, so it wasn’t entirely unexpected.
You see, this wasn’t the first time that I’ve managed to wreck or lose a phone while traveling. The saving grace of this most recent disaster was that, because the phone was very clearly a total loss–and likely at the bottom of a lake–there wasn’t any security breach for me to worry about.
Once I was in London and realized my phone was gone as I was walking out of a venue after a show. Someone must have nicked it while I wasn’t paying attention.
Sometimes, the problem is alcohol! A different time, drunk at a music festival, I entered an outdated password into my phone ten times, triggering a security measure that erased its contents. Since then, I’ve tried to be more careful about passwords.
The day gay marriage was legalized in Taiwan in May 2019—a very rainy day—I was standing outside of the Constitutional Court, waiting for the ruling along with the gathering crowd to report on it. Hiding from the downpour with my laptop in the media tent, I would periodically run out to take photos of the crowd reactions for my article, and I also took one or two phone interviews from international media about the ruling.
Keep us breathing fire!
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