So, June has been hectic in the run up to CONvergence as always, made so much worse by the spicy pillow incidents.

See, Sarah and I have had our phones for a while. We entered the month of June with our Pixel 5s, bought in the second or third batch of the releases in 2020ish. Neither of us likes changing phones any more often than is necessary, especially me. This may shock you, but I am not the technologically savvy one in the house, and I don’t like having to set up a new system to my preferences if I don’t have to. So I have a habit of keeping my phones and laptops until they truly, truly die.

Over the last few months, Sarah and I had noticed that our phones were getting hotter as they charged, and the battery life was failing. We were hoping to get another year out of them, but Sarah had started the process of looking into alternatives. And then a few weeks ago, Sarah noticed that her phone case had warped very slightly. She figured it was due to how often she keeps it in her back pocket and sits on it, especially in the car. We didn’t think much of it, honestly.

(If you know what the spicy pillow is, I assume at this point you’re already afraid for us.)

But recently we noticed that the warping was getting worse, enough so that Sarah had to take it out of the protective case. And finally one day we noticed that it wasn’t just *warping.* The phone was actually swelling.

This is the spicy pillow. It’s a phone battery that has reached the end of its life and whose chemical reactions have started to run unchecked and gasses start to build up. The thing is that it isn’t reversible and it WILL result in the battery eventually exploding.

So this was BAD.

We immediately took Sarah’s phone to the amazing uBreakiFix people for help. They were able to locate precisely ONE Pixel 5 battery in the midwest that they could swap out for Sarah’s dangerous one. So we handed over her phone and came back a few hours later when the scary part was all done. They had to give her a new screen, too, because by that point the swelling battery had actually bent the screen beyond usability.

Crisis averted, right?

Not…exactly.

So, with Sarah’s repaired phone in hand, we were literally getting into the car to go home, and I just kind of…noticed? Or maybe twigged is the better word — twigged to something being not quite right. I mean, I hold my phone a lot. I know how it feels. And maybe it was this whole ordeal with Sarah’s spicy pillow that made me realize something wasn’t right.

So, while she was fiddling with her repaired phone, I took mine out of its case and held it up.

And….fuck. Mine was swelling too. Not nearly as badly, but enough.

On the off chance of a miracle, I walked right back into uBreakiFix and showed them. They agreed that my phone had probably just started doing what Sarah’s had been doing for the last few weeks. But they also reminded me that we’d already used up all our luck finding the literal only Pixel 5 battery in the midwest and there was no real chance of getting another any time soon.

So…guess who had to buy a new phone? While in the run-up to CONvergence when I am CONSTANTLY on the phone?

The real low point was a meeting where I was trying to coordinate with my team and the Board of Directors and others from various departments and I had no phone and couldn’t get the wifi working on my laptop either so I was having to do everything through other people and it was ANNOYING.

Anyway, in the end we bought me a Pixel 9 instead. If we could have avoided it, we would have. But there was no real option except to suck it up and move on. And now that I’ve had the phone for a bit, I like it fine. The camera is way better, for one. I’m still finding settings I have to adjust, but eventually we’ll get to like each other. And in the meantime, Sarah is hoping to keep her Pixel 5 until the 11s come out so she can get a new one too.

If there’s a moral to the story, it’s: keep an eye on batteries in electronics. You want to catch them before you have to think about how to prevent a literal explosion of toxic chemicals resulting in a fire. If the spicy pillow swells, get yourself a new battery or a new device and hand it over to the people who know how to keep it safe before detonation.

In the meantime, I’m keenly aware that computer troubles come in threes. Both phones dying in the same week makes one and two, and I don’t consider my wifi problems to be number three. So I’m just holding my breath and hoping that I can get through CVG without anything worse happening. Cross your fingers for me!

…

Update from the future: CVG technical issues were not too bad, and certainly no devices exploded. BUT Sarah’s motherboard is dying now, so that’s definitely number three. I fucking called it.