The Death of Kije
I had slowly become accustomed to having this strange device sitting beside me constantly during my working hours. Like the fictional Russian character, Lieutenant Kije, the smart phone had assumed a life of its own despite it being a mere artifact of someone’s imagination. Like Kije, it had a number of life characteristics that gave shape to it’s personality.
Care and Feeding
Never have I cared for an inanimate object as well as I cared for this glitzy bauble. You might have thought it was a Fabergé Egg or some other precious, bejeweled commodity. It lived life safely in its Otterbox and was never allowed out. It was never dropped or otherwise mishandled. Certainly, exposure to moisture was out of the question. I even purchased a special screen cleaning solution that clearly said not to spray directly on the screen, but to spray on to the micro-pore cloth and then used the dampened cloth to clean the screen.
Routine Activities
Nightly, the device was plugged into the recharger that came with it, using the USB 3.0 cable fitted with a Micro plug and supplied by Samsung. Charging, of course, has nothing to do with data transfer. Presumably if I had plugged the cable into a USB 3.0 port on my PC, it would have operated a incredible speeds. The device has a 32 gigabyte SD card so the potential for large data transfer is real.
Death
on the evening of April 24, 2014 I put on a quilted jacket, snapped the Otterbox cover on my cell phone and put the phone in the jacket pocket, headed out for a short walk in the nearby park. After about a half an hour I returned, but when I removed the Otterbox cover discovered I was unable to get the device to display anything. It wouldn't power up. Puzzled, I wondered if I had forgotten to charge the device and the battery had run down. I plugged the device into the charger and observed... nothing.
Somehow, the device had died during my walk.