On wednesday, we finally witnessed the typical portuguese winter weather (so far we were having summer-like hot sunny days). This, of course, meant that just by quickly looking through the window I was able to tell I wasn’t going to attend the only class I usually have on wednesdays.
It was raining dogs and cats. And it was windy, the kind of “windy” that makes trees dance to techno music. Also, the kind of “windy” that would almost immediately get rid of my umbrella. And the kind of rainy that would render my raincoat powerless.
Even if going to Lisbon would help me getting some laundry done, well, nothing better than spending the time working on one of the several assignments I had to do, right?
But it was rainy, which means drops of dihydrogen monoxide were falling subject to a [vertical] gravitational acceleration close to 9.80665 m·s⁻², against whatever direction the wind was pointing it to (Thus also subject to the acceleration imposed by wind — maybe I should write a paper on this? And there’s also drag.). Which includes my window. A window that is not tight enough to keep water out. So, either I had to get up each couple minutes minutes to clean the window and put the water in a bucket, or I could use the window blinds to avoid that.
So I decided to set my room in darkness and turn the lightbulb on (it’s a CFL, so Natalie Portman can’t get mad at me). This means I’d now be able to work without interruptions, right? So I grab a cup of water to drink while I work, and I start looking at the files with parts of the assignment. With my cell phone over the desk, in order to avoid missing any calls and to be aware of text messages.
What I didn’t mention yet is that the electricity supply here is done through a rather… sensitive network, which has some issues with rain.
Right. Then I have an empty, black, dark room. With a chair and other stuff between me and the window. My first urge, from my former cell phone, is to reach the phone and turn the flashlight on. My new phone has no flashlight, but I said to myself: “whatever… the screen brightness still helps”.
So I try to grab the phone. Unfortunately the cup of water that I fetched a while ago happened to be between my hand and my cell phone. Which means that now I also had to deal with whatever was wet over the desk.
After managing to (literally) shed some light over this issue, I found out only two things got wet: my cell phone and a piece of paper.
The piece of paper is the one in which, a couple hours ago, I had written some URLs that people pointed me to on foonetic, as the computer kept going out due to shorter, quick outages, which effectively made my IRC backlog unreliable. It seems paper is not that reliable, either…
The phone didn’t look that much wet, the outside of the back cover was wet and that was all. But anyway, to be sure, I opened it and took the battery and the SIM out. Now I just had to use the hair dryer to be really sure it’s not wet at all. Right? The dryer that needs to be connected to the mains. Oh, right…
[Edited to make the comments on rain acceleration more realistic (that is, closer to actual science than anything produced by Jerry Bruckheimer — it's not that hard, believe me). I don't want to sound like Horatio Caine.]
