Peanut Butter and Cell Phones - Not A Good Combination

I’m not a very technologically savvy person at all. It’s usually Nick’s job to makes the gadgets and gizmos around here work. When it’s time to choose one for my use, I tell Nick what I want it to do, and he finds the best one, usually meaning the one I’m least likely to get incredibly frustrated with. He’s very technologically savvy. Opposites attract, right?

Dangerous to Cell Phones!

I finally joined the world of smart phones during the summer, and I’ve mostly been happy with it. I like text messaging a lot more than I thought I would, I love having a great camera with me all of the time, and being able to easily check recipes while I’m cooking has been wonderful. I’ve had mostly good things to say about the smart phone. I was really loving it on Sunday night when I tried a new recipe for dinner, and made this peanut butter oatmeal for breakfasts for the week.

Since I’ve had to cut back on soy, I had to switch to a different kind of peanut butter. I prefer the regular Jif, but it has soy. The Jif Natural doesn’t have soy, so I switched to that. It’s not quite as good, but it’s close enough. The biggest issue is that the oil separates and you have to mix it back up every time. It’s not usually that big of a deal.

We had dinner, watched some TV, and went to bed. I didn’t use my phone at all Sunday night.

Monday morning (because everything happens on Monday) my boss called me while he was driving between the two offices. He didn’t seem to be able to hear me even though I could hear him. I called him back from a land line, and everything was fine. I didn’t think much of it because reception can be fairly sketchy on the drive between the two offices. I just assumed he had made it to a better area by the time I called him back.

I called my sister on the way back from lunch. Even though I could hear her (and all of her comments about my habit of accidentally muting myself) she didn’t seem to be able to hear me at all. Several tests later, we determined that something was definitely going on with my phone. I could hear calls made or received on it, but the person on the other end couldn’t hear anything.  Text messaging was working fine.  Internet was spotty and weird. 

My sister was convinced I’d dropped the phone in water or some other liquid, and just wasn’t fessing up to it. Nick asked the same thing when I arrived home with the phone for him to fix. He took the phone apart and asked me if I’d fried anything in peanut oil, and possibly dropped the phone in with it. I’d like to say I have the right to be outraged over that sort of question, but it’s really not that far outside the realm of possible ways I mess up techno gadgets. But I typically cook with olive oil, so I knew I hadn’t dropped it in peanut oil.

Nick said there was a coating of what seemed to be peanut oil all over the inside of the phone. It had gotten past the cover and pooled in the microphone. He cleaned it out, all the while trying to figure out where the peanut oil had come from, and got the phone back to working normally again. (I’d also managed to turn off the WiFi, which explained A LOT of problems I’d been having with the internet.)

My only input was surprise that it wasn’t flour from the recipe I’d made for dinner the night before. I’d touched the screen with floury hands quite a few times. Then I remembered the peanut butter oatmeal and the separated peanut butter.

I’m a fairly messy cook. You can almost always look at me and tell what I’ve made because I’m wearing part of it by the time I’ve finished cooking. There usually aren’t very many clear surfaces by the time I’ve finished. Including the cell phone. Most things just wipe right off of it without any trouble. Except peanut butter, apparently. So today’s Public Service Announcement is to keep your cell phone away from your peanut butter. Far, far away.

So what about you? Are you technologically savvy? What’s the weirdest thing you’ve gotten on your cell phone?