Don't pee on your phones

There are a lot of ways to lose or ruin a cell phone. You can leave it in a cab, you can carry it in your pocket and accidentally spill beer all over it, you can lose it at a party, you can get it stolen, you can drop it on the sidewalk and watch it shatter, you can eat a whole bunch of greasy fried chicken while tailgating outside a football game, talk on the phone, have it slip out of your greasy, disgusting fingers, and watch as it falls into the portable deep fryer, or whatever else you can think of.

There's a whole bunch of shit that can happen to phones. However, there is one method of ruining a phone that is so pathetic and so fucking bizarre that you'd never expect to personally know someone who did it even if you lived 500 years. Despite the extremely rare and insane circumstances, I know multiple people who have lost phones this way multiple times.

Full disclosure: I was in a fraternity in college. Fraternities are extremely secretive, so you may not know what I'm about to tell you. It's rare indeed that someone would ever reveal the kind of guarded information I'm about to tell you: Frat guys drink a shitload. Pause for a second while you process that revelation.

People would get mind-numbingly hammered on Jagermeister and beer and pass out on couches and floors on a more or less nightly basis. One time a particularly creative low-functioning alcoholic sat on the toilet while blackout drunk and passed out with his pants down mid-shit, but that's a story for another time. Anyways, people passing out drunk, pissing their pants, and ruining their phones by getting said piss all over them was a disturbingly common occurrence.

People who were temporarily phone-less due to showering their devices in gold would usually ask to borrow other peoples' phones. This always annoyed me because the people they called when they borrowed my phone would inevitably call back on my phone hours later, forcing me to act as secretary. When someone asked to use my phone after his third accident, I put my foot down. Causing $430 of property damage due to pissing yourself at the age of 22 is cool, but $645 is where I draw the line, dammit! Sometimes you have to set firm, harsh boundaries for the people you love.

I was thinking about all of this because last night my girlfriend told me how one of her coworkers lost a cell phone by leaving it in a cab. I brought up the urination incidents from my college days, and then I proudly proclaimed that I've never done it myself. Then I had a sudden realization: This is the kind of company I've kept. Thanks to my peers, my standards for socially acceptable behavior have been driven so low that I think not pissing all over expensive electronic devices is a laudable achievement. Holy shit.