Can you hear me now / is it in you?

The aforementioned Treo 650 is a dream come true for a gadget-freak like me - I can usually leave the man purse behind now, since my phone/camera/MP3 player/Palm/dayrunner has now been consolidated into a single device. I still had a year left on my contract so I had to pay full price for the Treo, but in my opinion it was well worth it (even though the phone reception sucks ass compared to my Nokia 3589).

So, a few weeks ago I stopped for gas on my way to work. I noticed a sign advertising 32oz. bottles of Gatorade on sale - 2 for $2. Since they recently took away the water cooler and the vending machine at work steals my money 50% of the time, I grabbed a couple on the way out, tossed them onto the passenger seat and drove on.

When I get to work I shut the car off and start to gather my stuff to head inside. When I reach for my phone, I can't help but notice that it seems to be a lot colder and wetter than I remember - turns out that the bottlecap on one of the bottles of Gatorade was cracked, and since the seatcovers in my car are neoprene (the material wetsuits are made of) my phone had been marinating in a puddle of Citrus Cooler for the last twenty minutes.

(Just for your infomation, if any piece of valuable electronics you own ever gets wet, the ABSOLUTE LAST thing you should ever do is TURN IT ON. But that's the first thing I did, of course. The phone actually did turn on - when the keyboard backlighting turned on, the buttons were ORANGE, and the phone was switching back and forth between different applications at random.)

I actually did get the phone working again - a quick search on teh intarweb reveals that this happens surprisingly often, and it could have been worse (I read stories of people dropping their cell phones in swimming pools, the ocean, and even a port-a-potty). I removed the battery, flooded the phone with denatured alcohol, rinsed it thoroughly, and put it in the oven on the lowest setting for a few hours. Every feature on the phone worked, although it was a little "swollen" looking from it's time in the oven, and the LCD had some funky ghost images on it. I called my provider and they agreed to send me a new phone for $50 since I didn't have insurance but it was still under factory warranty (I might have left out some of the details about what happened...)