Client Question: What’s the worst you’ve seen?
When we are out at our clients, repairing their iPhones, we occasionally get asked about the most badly damaged iPhone we have ever repaired.
I think this is probably a coping mechanism, allowing the client to feel a bit better about dropping their iPhone and needing to have the screen replaced. In life, people seem comforted by knowing that they could have been worse off…
Over the years we have come across a few horror stories, however an iPhone 4 screen repair we did last week tops the list.
Our client was driving home in heavy rain when he had the misfortune of having two tyres punctured by debris on the road, at the same time.
He climbed out of the car and while trying to deal with his tyre crisis in the pouring rain, put his iPhone down on the roof of his car. He set to work on the tyres and managed to make plan so that he could drive home. He completely forgot his iPhone 4 on top of the car…
A while after getting home he realized his phone was missing and realised what he had happened. He knew that it had been in the rain and that it would have fallen off the car as soon as he had pulled off, so the phone would have been at least water damaged, had probably been driven over and there was a good chance someone would have noticed it and stopped and picked it up and kept it as their own.
Thankfully, the story doesn’t end there. A jogger was running down the road shortly after the rain stopped and had noticed the iPhone 4 lying in the road. He picked it up and took it home. It had been driven over by cars and the glass front was smashed. The battery was also flat. He had an iPhone/iPad charger at home so he plugged the iPhone in and amazingly, the screen turned on and showed that it was charging!
A great feature of the iPhone screen design is that the touch pickup (know as the digitizer) is laminated to the back of the glass and it rarely breaks when the iPhone has been dropped and the glass has cracked. This means that it is still possible to use the iPhone, even though it looks terrible. Depending on how badly smashed the screen is, there is a risk of getting glass splinters in your fingers or ear when using the iPhone but we find they usually break in such a way that the whole screen stays intact, without sharp pieces sticking out.
After charging for a while, the iPhone booted up. The jogger went through the contacts on the iPhone and managed to track down the owner and let him know that his phone had been found. The owner was ecstatic and arranged to collect his iPhone.
The owner called us and asked us to come out to him and assess his phone to see if it was repairable. One of our technicians was at his office within 12 working hours and stripped the phone to pieces. He cleaned all signs of water damage, checked all the components and replaced the screen with an OEM iPhone 4 replacement screen. He booted the phone up, tested everything and unbelievably, the iPhone worked 100%!
Can you just imagine what a process it would have been to do this through one of the cellular service providers? These kinds of iPhone repairs are what we are good at and we are overjoyed when we are able to be part of a success story.
As with all our clients, if this customer breaks his iPhone 4 screen again, we’ll fix it for him, on-site, and give a 10% discount because it would be a repeat repair. For more info, check out the post about our offer: We feel your pain… Even if we didn’t fix the screen the first time, if you can prove it’s been repaired before, we will give you a 10% discount.