Village Idiot Of The Week: Woman Falls Into Outhouse Trying To Retrieve Phone

Look, we all know what a massive pain losing your phone can be. Nobody wants to fork over a bunch of cash for a new one, reinstall all your apps, hoping to god that it backed itself up recently. Having to use web twitter or instagram to post an admission of guilt like “sry friends lost my phone!! Reach me here until next week!” At the same time, there are some depths that it is not worth trying to retrieve a phone from. Namely, a massive pool of human excrement.

I’d be willing to get my hands dirty in a sewer drain, or a train station trash can, to rescue my phone from its disgusting fate. When the prison in question is just… so, so much human waste, and the phone’s been sitting in there, I’m just going to go ahead and consider it broken. By the definition of the word, it may still be operational, but I am no longer willing to have that phone be something I touch hundreds of times a day and occasionally put next to my face.

This isn’t a purely hypothetical exercise. This is just my judgment of a decision, one that I consider extremely poor, that a woman made after dropping her phone in an outhouse in Olympic National Park. As you can guess, when I say “dropping her phone in an outhouse,” I do not mean the floor of the outhouse. I mean the hole.

Instead of cutting her losses and just telling people she dropped it in a ravine or something, she decided to try to fish it out with a dog leash, because she needed more of her belongings covered in #$@%. That didn’t work because, why would it? Again, the chance to disengage from this entire situation presented itself. Again, she persisted. This time, trying to create a makeshift harness from the dog leashes to suspend herself above the contents of the outhouse, like she was trying to heist a turd, and retrieve the cursed phone.

I don’t know what sort of misguided confidence you can have in your own engineering skills and the strength of dog-leash material to hang yourself mouthfirst above a sea of waste, but I guess she had it in spades. Of course, the world is a cruel place and physics are a cruel mistress, so she of course immediately just fell headfirst into the human-made-swamp contained beneath the outhouse seat.

Reunited with her phone, she attempted to escape for 10-15 minutes before she called for help. Any time you’re calling 911 from a bathroom is a pretty bad time, but at least you aren’t usually telling them that you’re inside the toilet. She was retrieved and hosed down before leaving and attempting to live the rest of her life as if this hadn’t changed everything. My deepest condolences to whatever nearby Apple Store employee is about to be given a foul-smelling iPhone to check for “water damage.”

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