When I was in Scotland last month, my electronics decided to try to commit suicide.
It started on Sunday morning when I managed to drop my phone while taking photos on my walk around Greenock; I’ve gone… however long I’ve had cellphones (two decades? More? Let’s go with more) without dropping my phone and damaging it, but that streak came to an end when it fell and the screen lowkey shattered on the top left, with cracks extending all the way down. Oh no, I thought, this might be trouble. Maybe I’ll have to get the screen repaired or maybe replaced.
Any question about that “maybe” was resolved when, less than two hours later, I dropped it again in the apartment I was staying in, making all the cracks significantly worse. I got online on my laptop and made an appointment in the local Apple store to get it repaired… and then, on rising after doing so, immediately tripped on the power cable for the laptop, throwing it across the room, putting a 30 degree bend in the part of the cable that connects to the laptop — thankfully, it still worked — and scratching the laptop up pretty badly.
That evening, I dropped the phone a third time, taking a solid chip out of the screen.
I was telling my sister about the first few events that evening, and she pointed out that, on the last trip to the UK in April, I plugged my phone into a wall socket, only for the socket to literally explode and destroy the charging cable in the process. (As well as the power adapter I was using at the time.) “Maybe you’re cursed when it comes to using anything in the UK,” she suggested. It was beginning to feel like it.
The next day, I went to the Apple Store and paid an extortionate amount of money to have the screen replaced; it didn’t take that long and, honestly, was a pretty straightforward process. When I left the Store, I tried to log into my phone… and I couldn’t. It refused to recognize my thumbprint. I rushed back to the Store and panicking, asked what was happening. “Oh, you just need to input your thumbprint again for the first time, we forgot to do that before,” they said. “Why are you so upset? It’s okay. It’s not like it’s broken or anything.”
I didn’t want to sound too out there, arguing that all of my electronics had been trying their best to convince me otherwise recently.