If you drop your phone in water does rice fix it or not?

IdleRich

IdleRich
Who was it who said something about how if you get your phone wet you should pack it in rice - and then an Asian guy will come and fix it for you? They were Chinese so apparently it was alright but i don't know. Of course the real idea is that rice somehow sucks the water out of the phone like those weird sachets you get in trainers and stuff (I accidentally ate some of those once but that's another story).

I thought of that cos the other day Liza dropped her phone in the toilets of The Windmill, we were looking for rice so we could pack the phone in it but none was immediately available so we didn't know what to do. I googled and some places said that it's a myth and in fact it could damage it or worse. We couldn't open the phone or really do anything and by the time we got back to Lisboa it seemed totally fucked. She took it to the Vodafone store in Vasco da Gama centre and he suggested their specialist tech support store round the corner. The guy there said "you shoulda put it in rice" and when we tentatively suggested it might be a myth he said "Nope" really confidently. He said the phone was fucked and all she could do was buy a new one at 120 euros plus she couldn't transfer the screen insurance so really it was gonna cost her 150.

Liza suggested taking it to one of those slightly dodgy Indian shops on Almirante Reiss cos there was nothing to lose and the guy was all "they're just a bunch of chancers who don't know what they're doing, borderline criminals really". But she thought it was worth a try and, half an hour later phone was working, it had a new screen and it only cost 50.

So it kinda seems to me that the criminal is the guy who told her it couldn't be fixed and tried to trick her out of sering the guy who did know how to fix it so she would drop three times the money on a new one. So I drove her back to Vodafone shop to call that guy a cunt/make an official complaint but it was shut so we had to go to the original store. There they were having none of it, saying that that was original policy, they were ordered to tell people not to go to the independent stores cos they might fix it badly (though how that would be worse than it being totally broken I dunno) or sometimes apparently they steal parts (again I'd risk that happening if the official prognosis was that nothing could be done).

Oh, and the guy who did fix it... asked him if rice helped or not and he said something like "No, well, er maybe it can, but I don't think so but perhaps it does but not much and it could damage it I dunno really" - it was good to have it cleared up by a real authority.
 
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sufi

lala
So it kinda seems to me that the criminal is the guy who told her it couldn't be fixed and tried to trick her out of sering the guy who did know how to fix it so she would drop three times the money on a new one. So I drove her back to Vodafone shop to call that guy a cunt/make an official complaint but it was shut so we had to go to the original store. There they were having none of it, saying that that was original policy, they were ordered to tell people not to go to the independent stores cos they might fix it badly (though how that would be worse than it being totally broken I dunno) or sometimes apparently they steal parts (again I'd risk that happening if the official prognosis was that nothing could be done).
voda are officially proper cunts tho https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/28/sadmin-mother-death-vodafone
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
So a definite deliberate tactic. I bet that if they collect a few quid they are not entitled to from every dead person with a vodafone contract then it will add up into quite a tidy sum.
 
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