The Phone Whisperer
Erik German's GlobalPost story on Rabat's electronics market reminded me of one of my favorite moments from Ratanakiri. My cell phone had taken a serious soaking during a boat trip and refused to turn on. None of the home remedies worked - drying the parts in the sun, fiddling with the sim card, removing the battery and waving it around the way we used to do with Nintendo cartridges. The prognosis was grim. Then my translator suggested I take it to the local phone doctor.
We went to the cell phone shop near the central market and handed my moribund Nokia over to a twenty-something man who examined it with the flinty squintiness of a diamond merchant. Then he nodded, pointed to a chair for me, and sat down with the phone at a small table strewn with tools.
For the next twenty minutes, I watched as he disassembled the phone into microscopic-sized parts. At various points in the operation he used tweezers, a toothbrush, and something that looked like mouthwash. When I tried to crane in for a closer look, he waved me away impatiently, as though a stray breath could ruin the operation.
I had just started to calculate the cost of a new phone when he turned around and presented me with the phone, on and glowing like the day I bought it second-hand. Total cost? 1500 riel - about 35 cents. The skills of a phone whisperer? Priceless.
Posted on Tuesday, Mar 23, 2010
