Kim is straight up when she tells the story of the day her iPhone 8 fell into the toilet.
"I'm a lady of middle age who has had three children, and when you've got to go, you've got to go!"
Kim, a caregiver who lives just south of Hamilton in Te Pahu, doesn’t normally keep her phone in the back pocket of her jeans. But on this day she did, and when nature called she quickly answered it – and was devastated when she heard the splash and realised her phone had fallen into the toilet bowl.
"I usually keep my phone close, but not in my back pocket. I don't wear a watch so I depend on it to tell the time, and I've got something like 12,000 photos on it, but luckily they’re stored in the Cloud [computer data storage where digital data is stored elsewhere] so I could get them back – unlike a friend of mine who had something similar happen."
As Kim's two youngest teenage children laughed at her dilemma, she snatched the phone out, wiped and dried it off and put it into the hot water cupboard in a container of rice hoping it could be salvaged.
When that didn't work, Kim called us – she's been a customer for close to two decades – and sheepishly explained what had happened.
"They told me not to worry or be embarrassed because it happens all the time!" says Kim. "It was all resolved in a matter of minutes without me having to jump through any hoops. The person I spoke to sympathised with me and made the whole thing stress-free."
Kim now has a new phone – and a waterproof cover – and no longer carries it in her back pocket!
