Us.Workhard

I have a $300 Palm Tungsten T3 with a gorgeous slide-out 320 x 480 pixel screen, a powerful 400 MHz Intel XScale processor, and loads of software that turns my T3 into an organizer, a game console, an entertainment player (plays mp3, avi, mpg). It’s literally a computer in your hand. Whenever playing bejeweled, sudoku, chess, or listening to mp3 songs or watching my son’s piano videos, I prefer the handy little technological marvel over iPod or other players for its great versatility.

But like all good things, one day my wonderful PDA died! – Uh, at least I thought so, for an agonizing while.

It started on a gloomy day. I was woken up by my wife, who looked ominously distraught:”Promise me that you’ll not get angry?” Sensing something’s happening, I reluctantly obliged. “Oh well, here it goes: I washed your PDA in our washing machine”. I was stunned:”What?! You’re joking right?” But she’s definitely not smiling. I rushed downstairs to check on my PDA, and there it lied on the table, cold and wet, lifeless. Its once-bright-n-beautiful screen soaked with water, the paint peeled off its leather cover in patches, but other than that, it looked almost nicer – after all, it IS CLEANER.

In utter despair, I reflectively tried to turn the power on, knowing that it simply could not work. Miracle did not happen. I turned to wife:”How long was it washed?”. “30 minutes”. Absent-mindedly, I interrogated:”What was the cycle used?”. “Normal load, warm water”. As if it mattered at all. There it was, my valued mini-computer, washed for a full 30 minutes and spun-dried afterwards. Its poor electronics were first short-circuited, then almost pulled apart by centrifugal forces, and its battery was likely shot. I fell into the chair:”All right, you’ve done it – say goodbye to our beloved PDA now”. Ever so pessimistic, wife was suspiciously a lot more optimistic than I was – as the PDA’s not hers – “Well, maybe we could wait till it dries and it may just work”. Yeah right, like that’s gonna happen. “How could YOU know?” I bluntly asked. “Well, I used to have this non-waterproof little electronic watch, and once it fell into water. I just put it under a lamp, and when it dried up, it worked again”. “A cheap electronic watch? It hardly has any circuitry, and its battery’s easily replaced! We’re talking about a 400 MHz computer right now, with millions of ICs powered by a rechargeable battery! Have you ever seen someone dropping a computer into water and just put it under a lamp and get it back?” Even the most insane dreamer would have to agree that a 30-minute washing cycle in a topload laundry machine would’ve killed a 400 MHz computer.

But as it always goes, wife tried her idea out anyway. Her rare optimism was strangely contagious, or I simply had nothing better to do, I decided to speed the drying process up after seeing that the meek lamp power hardly helped anything after 10 minutes – I can easily see droplets of water flowing under the screen.

What would be the first thing to try? Well, since the PDA was all messed up by the washer, naturally I hoped that the dryer would clean up the mess. But certainly the PDA cannot take the pounding of the roller inside the dryer, so I put the PDA inside two thick, dry socks with one enclosing the other. That didn’t help too much – from the instant the PDA went into the dryer I heard loud thuds inside the dryer, and every thud made me wonder if the PDA was all torn up already. After 5 minutes of torture, I took the PDA out. Sadly, the dryer offered no visible help at all.

Determined, I took a blow dryer out and started blowing on the PDA. The hot air obviously was much more powerful – you could see that the thin film of water started to retreat from under the screen, leaving a slightly white trail stuck on the screen. I quickly stopped the blow dryer – even though it worked well to dry the PDA, I would not want a PDA with many white streaks under the screen.

What else? Well, it just depends on what one could lose when dealing with a PDA washed so clean that it carried the fragrance of the laundry detergent. I guess absolutely nothing would be further lost even if one used the most radical measures to try to dry and revive this thing. But I was gonna be cautious anyway. Obviously I did not want the PDA to be soaked with water for any longer, and I did not want a PDA to be so quickly and unevenly dried that it’d have white steaks all over. After careful balancing and meticulous planning, very naturally I chose … oven!

So my water-soaked PDA continued its unknown-fated journey inside oven heat for a while (I could not remember the exact temperature or minutes I used now, but it’s likely about 150-180 F for about 20-40 minutes). Then I let the oven cool down by itself. Finally, my PDA was at least dry again! While being dry might help the chance of the PDA to revive, my previous experience with drying my car remote, a very simple electronic device, suggested that my efforts with the PDA were likely rather futile – after my remote was dried, it woke me up at night 3 times because it sounded my car alarm and I had to put it in a quilt to stop its mischief (on a positive note, though, the remote did return to sanity with time).

Now, back to my PDA – of course it could not be turned on yet, as the battery was totally discharged by water. But what’s worse is that the battery may simply be dead already. Yet, since I was sure that my PDA was completely dry, I started charging the PDA up anyway. About a minute or so into the charging, I tried to turn the PDA on, and it turned on!! Unfortunately it showed nothing but a completely white, and a little wrinkled, screen. Better than nothing I guess. After another 30 minutes of charging, I tried again. Guess what? My T3 came right on, showing me a clear, bright, colorful, although still wrinkled, screen. I had to through the setup of the T3 again due to its complete discharge earlier, but after one hotsync, I got all my programs and data back! It looked almost as good as before, and I guarantee that at that particular moment, that was the world’s cleanest working PDA, bar none!

So there you have it, a story about my amazingly durable Palm Tungsten T3 being subjected to a washing cycle and lived to tell the story through its laundry fragrance! Oh, the best part of it? It’s a “Made in China” product too!

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