One of my most prized possessions is the iPhone I bought back in October of last year. The phone has made my life so much easier.

The only problem with this little wonder device is that it can and will break. Two of my friends have dropped their phones shattering the screens beyond recognition.

The deal is, when you are up for a new phone with AT&T, you can get an iPhone for as little as $99. But, and this is a big but, if you break it, it’s not under warranty and it will cost me $399 to replace mine.

The two easiest ways to break an iPhone is to drop it in water or drop it on the ground. I have done both.

The water drop happened at the gym one night when I had the phone in my pocket when I went to the ladies room. I don’t think I need to explain further how the phone was submerged. Luckily, I heard the phone fall and grabbed it in about 1.2 seconds. It was soaked, but I immediately put it under the hand dryer in an attempt to dry it out.

A friend of mine, who I consider to be an Apple device expert, said after he dropped his in water, the day he bought it I might add, he put the phone in a bag of rice overnight. So I took his advice and as soon as I got home from the gym. I filled a sandwich bag with rice and placed the phone inside. I had no idea if this would work, but at this point I had nothing left to lose.

By the next day, I was starting to lose hope. I even called the AT&T store in Winston to talk to the salesman who sold me the phone. He didn’t give me much hope either. Luckily later than day, I removed the phone from the bag of rice and tried the restart technique and it worked! I breathed a huge sigh of relief, not just because my phone was working again, but because I didn’t have to shell out big bucks for another phone.

So this past Monday night I stopped by a friend’s house for a visit and on the way out the door, she handed me some books. In my clumsiness, the phone fell out of my hand and hit her concrete front porch. When I tried to see if the phone was still working, it wouldn’t even turn on.

I calmly went home and plugged the phone into the charger to see if that would help. But it didn’t. I even tried using my home phone to call the cell phone to see if it would ring and it did, but the screen was completely black.

Again, I had a little talk with myself about being more careful with my phone and prayed that beyond all hope it would somehow start working again before I had to make the trek to the store to buy another phone. In one last ditch effort to fix the phone, I noticed that part of the top cover was sticking up about a quarter-inch more than the rest of the faceplate, so I thought, “What the heck, it’s already not working, what do I have to lose?” So I turned the phone face down and whacked it on the counter to knock the faceplate back into place. It worked, but the phone was still dead as a doornail.

The next morning as I was sleeping, I heard the phone make a noise all the way from the kitchen. When I got up, I once again tried the emergency restart trick and sure enough, it came back on. Can I get an Amen sister!

In the future, I will try to be a lot more careful with the phone and doing common sense things like leaving it out of the rest room and not carrying it in my hand while my hands are already full. My mom always used to say that she should have named me Grace because I don’t have any, but after learning my lesson twice already, I don’t think my luck will hold out for a third time.

Mondee Tilley is a staff reporter with The Mount Airy News. She can be reached at mtilley@mtairynews.com or at 719-1930.