(Photograph by J. Muckle/Studio D. Ilustrations by Gabriel Silveira)

By Joel Johnson

Published in the July 2008 issue.

This is a DIY moment. While consumers are conditioned to send back broken merchandise, your phone’s warranty probably doesn’t cover water damage. And you may not have much luck pulling a fast one on your phone company—most of today’s phones come with a “water sticker” that permanently changes color if it gets wet.

The first step: Immediately cut the power by removing the battery. I know it’s tempting, but resist the urge to power up your phone to see if it works—just turning it on can short out the circuits. If you have a GSM phone (the type used by AT&T and T-Mobile), you’ll want to remove the SIM card as well. Even if your phone turns out to be beyond repair, the SIM should retain a lot of its onboard information, such as the contacts in your phone book.

With the battery safely set aside, you now have one goal—dry your phone, and dry it fast. If you let the moisture evaporate naturally, the chance of corrosion damaging the phone’s innards increases. Instead, blow or suck the water out. But don’t use a hair dryer—its heat can fry your phone’s insides. Instead, opt for a can of compressed air, an air compressor set to a low psi or a vacuum cleaner (a wet/dry Shop-Vac would be perfect). The idea is to use air to push or pull moisture out through the same channels it entered.

Finally, use a desiccant to wick away any leftover moisture. The most convenient choice is uncooked rice. Just leave the phone (and its disconnected battery) submerged in a bowl of grains overnight. If you’re worried about rice dust getting inside your phone, you can instead use the packets of silica gel that often come stuffed in the pockets of new clothes. But acting fast is far more important than avoiding a little dust, so don’t waste time shopping if you don’t already have a drawer full of silica gel.

The most important thing to remember is to avoid heat. That means no hair dryers, ovens, microwaves or extended periods in direct sunlight. While heat will certainly evaporate the moisture, it could also warp components and melt adhesives. Those fragile glues are also why you’ll want to avoid dunking the phone in rubbing alcohol (an oft­prescribed tip on the Web). Alcohol is a solvent and can dissolve the internal adhesives. (If you drop your phone in the toilet, it’s okay to wipe the outside with alcohol to disinfect it.)

One final, perhaps surprising, note: If your phone gets soaked in salt water, you should probably flush the whole thing in fresh water before it dries. When salt water evaporates, it leaves crystals that can damage a phone’s fragile components. Just be sure to remove the battery before flooding the device.

1. When you buy a new battery, be sure to fully charge it before yor first use (initialize). a nickel based battery needs to be charged for 16 hours initially, while lithium-ion battery needs to be charged for about 5 to 6 hours. Just ignore the information that tell you that the phone is flly charged, since it is inaccurate if the battery has not been initialized.
2. Keep the battery in a room temperature, try not to keep the battery in a high temperature place.
3. Know your battery type and how to handle it, read the manual.
4. Use only the charger that was meant for our battery.
5. If you are not going to use your phone for a long time, remove the battery and put it in a cool place, the refrigerator would be a good place, just remember to wrap your battery so your battery won’t be exposed to moisture, but don’t forget to put the battery in a room temperature at least for an hour and recharge it before you use it again.
6. Clean the battery contacts on your battery and on the phone using cotton buds and alcohol to clean the dust and maximize the efficiencies of the energy transfer

1. Geeks are different from other people
2. Geekwork is different from other work
3. Power is useless with geeks

Myth #1: Leadership is universal. Good leaders treat everyone alike.

Truth: If you want to lead someone, start out by understanding them. Geeks are just simply different from other people.

• Geeks are more loyal to technology than they are to you
• Insatiable curiosity
• Geeks revere the rational

Myth #2: If you know a tree, you understand a forest.

Truth: Groups are not just a collection of individuals.

• Geeks ignore official hierarchy. Deliberately
• Ambivalence about groups

Myth #3: Good leaders can lead anyone to do anything.

• Truth: What you would lead people to do affects how you lead them.

Geekwork is different from other work

• Failure is normal (succeed 26%, challenged 46%, failed 28%)
• Subordinates know more than managers
  • Knowledge inverse violates almost every common assumption about management and leadership

Motivating Geeks

• Select Wisely
• Manage Meaning
• Communicate Significance
• Show Career Path
• Projectize
• Encourage Isolation
• Engender External Competition
• Design Interdependence
• Limit Group Size
• Control Resource Availability
• Offer Free Food…Intermittently

Geeks De-motivator

• Exclusion from Decision Making
• Inconsistency
• Excessive Monitoring
• Focus on Tasks not Goals
• Unqualified Evaluation
• Misaligned Extrinsic Motivators
• Artificial Deadlines
• Changing Deadlines
• Organizational Disinterest
• Teams Without Skills

by Paul Glen