It’s rare as a chicken’s foot in a potpie to find a cell phone repair shop that repairs batteries in electronic devices.
The machine was tiny enough. The “pod” preceded by some no-longer-mass-marketed universally popular letter contained an LCD screen that would be large enough for an ant’s eye view if only it opened its compound peepers really wide. But inside the LCD was something more miniature still, something that couldn’t be plucked out even with the most delicate of tweezers. It was my X-pod. I wondered why I had purchased it in the job lot store, a warehouse of all sorts of odds and ends. Why didn’t my X-pod work? I wanted to dig out the microscopic battery with my clumsy fingers, but knew I wouldn’t dare.
I knew there were independent shops that repaired electronic things such as my X-pod, and could dig out the batteries inside, while teaching them to hum. I made a dash for the nearest cell phone repair shop, and then another, and then another. I saw the heads of clerks and desk attendants shake back and forth like negative bobble heads; a supposed technician said that he wasn’t “qualified” to open even a lowly X-pod’s case. “I can’t. It’s internal,” the guy with the dyed orange hair muttered, as if mouthing a pearl of wisdom from his foolish gob. I was beginning to grow weary of walking block after block, like a darn Quixote in search of a chicken’s foot in a potpie. “You will need to find a trained and qualified technician to do that,” said a cowardly technician with a lion-like mane who protested when I asserted that he was probably trained. “Do you want me to ruin your battery?” he finally said, “or maybe lose it on you?” This brought to mind a contact lens I’d once lost in a restroom at the airport, down one of those filthy sinks.
I kept walking, not daring to look back, as if somebody stupid might be gaining on me. Finally, I came to a storefront that gave me a tingle, and it wasn’t Jimmy. My heart started pumping faster as if it had just been resuscitated in a cardio-pulmonary manner. I’d never been to Utah, but something told me, perhaps a tiny voice inside the battery, that this was indeed the place. I walked in, confident. “Do you do batteries?”
“I’m a trained and qualified technician,” the dark-haired geeky guy said, “Let me see it. Yes I can.”
“It’s internal,” I warned him.
“Duh,” he said.
Jeff Gasner is with CPR-Cell Phone repair. The leader in Cell Phone Repair and iPod repair offering cell phone repair services nationwide. To learn more about Cell phone repair, ipod repair, cell repair services, visit Chicagocellrepair.com.
