My niece and I (part one of a two [or maybe three] part series)*:

 

As my younger siblings progress with their lives and build their families in part through procreation, I am sometimes afforded the opportunity to spend time with said procreates.  I have a total of three nieces and nephews, with one G-d willing on the way.  This is a story about a (quite short) road trip I took with my nearly three year-old niece; Chavie:

 

Backtrack.  This really happened:  I dropped my four month old Iphone in the toilet at work a month before the trip.  I did not drop it per se.  I left it on the toilet’s tank.  Commensurate with Newton’s basic laws, the force of my self-ejection from the seat was rebuffed by enough shaking on the toilet’s part for my phone to fall right into the ugly waters below.  

After a few second delay of processing facts like: ‘Yes, that is my phone, and yes, its present location is very undesirable indeed’, I temporarily quarantined my germaphobic sensibilities and scooped the wet phone out of its miserable environs.  

I (kind of) did what everyone advised me:  “Wipe the phone dry.  Clean it with some rubbing alcohol.  Put it in a container of rice, which will help to demoisturize the device’s innards at a possibly swifter rate.  Leave it like that for at least a week.”  I did remarkably well following these instructions, but the last step tripped me up.  

I tried turning the phone back on after about two days.  A sign appeared on its screen, which may well have said “You idiot, you weren’t supposed to turn me on for another five days, I’m still wet in a few spots dude - &*^% this hurts!  You really messed up, pal.  Do you hear that hissing sound?  It's the hissing of my stir-frying circuitry and five hundred of your hard-earned dollar bills vaporizing.  Goodbye.”  The sign may actually have been more like a fuzzy Apple logo that flickered out after a second or so; same difference - the phone was fried.

 

            And we shift to present tense:

Enter Chavie.  My sister’s prima donna.  Her little diva.  Chavie comes with her tatty and mommy to spend Shabbos with my parents recently.  

So Erev Shabbos, I go to Apple’s nook on the web and schedule a ‘Motzahey-Shabbos-Kodesh; Oh-Shabbos-We-Are-So-Sad-That-For-The Next-143.45-Hours-We-Will-Be-Able-To-Do-Melacha-Oh-How-Will-We-Make-It-Through-Till-We-See-You-Again’ appointment with a member of Apple’s Genius Bar.  

Let’s stop right there momentarily.  ‘Genius Bar’?  Are you kidding me?  A crew of skinny tattooed bohemian emo-haired kids that moonlight stocking shelves at Wal-Mart?  Gotta hand it to Apple – best snake oil sales people this side of Nigeria (all you Iphoners, just wait for the Palm Pre, don’t worry – I’ll look away when your envious noggin sends a neuro-signal to your bowels to automatically release contents therein).  

Tangent over.  So I’m thinking that I’ll bring Chavie with me to the store right after Shabbos (this being the aforementioned ‘road trip’).  She’ll be my secret weapon.  Everyone, (maybe even nerdy bass-guitar look-alikes selling Ipods) love young kids, right?  I’ll give them my water damaged phone, and they’ll be hypnotized by the powerless three year old beside me, and, under a Jedi-mind-trick-like trance, they’ll swap the liquifried phone for another one, a process that would for sure go as smooth as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.    

*Photo of my niece's stunt double, on loan from the Smithsonian Museum of Plagiarism.