I guess it depends on the importance of the item. I too had a similar experience. I once had a job delivering parts. My boss was a real hot head. The company made me carry a pager. I was at a job site and I was taking a dump and the pager fell into the toilet. Knowing how my boss whould react I quickly stuck my hand in my urine and fecal water and retrived it. Well, it was too late. After I got back in the van I placed the pager on the defrost vents to try and dry it out. I couldn't get it to work so I bit the bullet and told my boss I lost the pager. So I stuck my hand in the can for nothing!!
I have dropped other things in my toilet at home but I have fished them out and usually thrown them away or washed them throughly. You can't just flush anything...could fuck up your plumbing.

Did the item fall in the toilet before or after you soiled the water? If the water was crap-free, I'd say you had a brief window of semi-cleanliness during which you could have retrieved your belonging. It's nasty, sure, but water it's the same water you would use to wash your hands. But if it was soiled water, i dunno. Macguyver would have tried to construct a crude reaching device using toilet paper rolls and paper clips.

The water was soiled. I had the pager cliped to my pants and it fell into the bowl when I started to pull my pants up. I had no time to think, I wanted to pull that bugger out of the water before it was ruined...but I guess 2 seconds was all it took.

Carolyn, what about you? Was the water soiled? Because clean toilet water, although disgustin, is still touchable, if you wash your hands...

well dave, the water was clean...as clean as Atlanta airport swamp water can be. but the splash of the phone as it hit the water went under the stall next to me and the old woman next to me made this gross groan. what can i say, i panicked. people were waiting! i looked around for tools...nothing. i could hear the people in the line outside bitching, and i didn't want them to think i was actually using the bathroom (nice girls don't use public toilets). i flushed. but in the days following the "flush" i wonder where my phone is? and does it still work?

This reminds of a very un PC story. Please forgive me.

A hilljack from eastern Kentucky was in the outhouse taking a shit when he accidently dropped a quarter in the toilet. Knowing the value of a quarter, he promptly dropped a five dollar bill in the shitter. When his buddy who was waiting outside saw what was taking place he asked, "hey Billybob, what the hell you go an drop the $5 bill in thar?
Billybob responds, "I aint going down there for just a quarter".

I hate cellphones, so for me the choice not to retrieve is a no brainer. However, if I really wanted the phone I'd reach in and grab it as long as there wasn't any foreign matter in the shitter. I'm not afraid to touch my own shit or piss.

Like Doniker, I had a pager in the shitter incident, only much worse. I used to work at a small wasterwater treatment plant. I was on call during the weekends and had to "do rounds" on weekend mornings.

On one Sunday, I went to the plant to do rounds. For some reason I wore sweatpants instead of my normal jeans. Since I normally kept my pager hooked to my belt, I had to instead put it in my pocket. The sweatpants didn't have pockets so I stuck the pager in the breast pocket of my flannel shirt.

While doing rounds, I was on the catwalk over the Clarifiers (large tanks about 12 feet deep where the "solids" settle out of the wastewater). My task was to measure the depth of the sludge at the bottom of the Clarifier using of all things a tool called "The Sludge Judge". To do this, I leaned over the edge of the railing, when PLOP! My pager went overboard, down the drink. Now my boss was a real prick and dreaded the thought of having to tell him that I lost the pager in the Clarifier. I was also relatively new to the job and I was naively afraid that the pager would clog up the equipment.

I acted quickly and duct-tapped a coffee can to the bottom of the sludge judge as I attempted to fish out the pager. I spent a good 20 minutes doing this until futility reared its ugly head. I gave into defeat and admitted my mistake. The boss just laughed at me and said that I wasn't the first to lose my pager in the clarifier.

Just think, somewhere in the Greater Atlanta wastewater system, is your phone!

I dropped my cell phone while peeing one night. I was kinda drunk and was checking messages when I got home. I figured I'd pee while listening to voicemail with the phone wedged between my cheek and shoulder. Unfortunately, nokia phones don't sit there too well, especially if you're drunk. The phone kit the bowl while my pee was still raining down. I retrieved it quickly, after finishing urinating (its bad to stop midstream) and quickly rinsed it off. I took it apart and let it dry over night but in the morning it didn't work. I bought a new one soon but should have waited, the wet one started working a few days later. I gave it to a friend and he still uses it to this day. I never told told him how it got wet, just that it did.

The best phone I ever had was a Uniden cordless. I was outside one day talking on it and when I finished I set it on top of my truck. I walked away and forgot about it. It rained buckets all that night and the next day I found it on the cement driveway all wet. The battery was dead, but after a 5 minute charge it worked great.

That's great about the merits of cell phones and all, but this is about retrieiving items from the toilet. Let's pretend Carolyn NEEDS to get her phone out of a nasty crap-filled toilet. Short of plunging her hand in the muck, what are some strategies she could use to retrieve it?

a toothbrush? preferably not your own.

and by the way I never keep "MY" toothbrush in the bathroom. I heard years ago that when you flush the toilet, sewage gas germs fly all around your bathroom.

Where do you keep your toothbrush? A hyperbaric chamber?

My toothbrush is about 14" from my toilet...Oh yeah...I have grabbed actual poops to examine them, so I would not have a prob. fishing something out, as long as I had a place to wash I would do it.

Peace

G Ras

I keep my toothbrush in my bedroom.

The phone would be useless anyway. Water kills Phones.
Thats why I don't play rock paper scisors. I play Water Brain Cell Phone. Cell Phone Beats Brain. . .Water Beats Cell Phone and Brain Beats water.

I'm Kidding I don't play that I'm just brain dammaged from too many cell calls

I suppose one technique would be to don a rubber glove to retrieve the item. In Carolyn's case, given that she was in airport, she probably doesn't have any rubber gloves handy. She could borrow some from the security guards looking for bombs in rectal cavities (assuming they use rubber gloves). If not, she could just get a plastic trash bag from the cleaning people, wrap it around her hand, and go digging.

i keep my toothbrush in a case in my bathroom. i have had to fish out many keys in the toilet, couple pagers, all my toilet, and none soiled. i was drunk most of the times i dropped them. :)

i would just like to interject here and let a few important facts be known: according to Reader's Digest's investigative study, most flushed toilets contain far less fecal matter than the average kitchen sink. i'm not quite sure how, but there you have it. toilet water is cleaner than a sink full of water. happy fishing!

If I dropped a phone in a airport bathroom and needed it back I'd buy a condom from the wall dispensers that are in every males airport bathroom has and stick my hand in that to get the phone out. Unless of course a cleaning person was around to let me have a glove.

The real question is not "how would you retrieve it"--it should (assuming it was submerged in a post #2 bowl) be "how do you clean it" and the part deux "how would you even attempt to stick the thing near your face knowing its recent bathing history?"

poop.

Happened to me too. Worst part is it also was my secretary's phone as she lent me hers while mine was in the shop for service. We have those stupid squatter toilets here in Asia and when I squatted the motorola popped off my belt and in the drink. I had no choice, I had to get it. It happened at our company and someone would have seen it in the hole. I took it home and took it apart and used a blow dryer (after the hand dryer in the bathroom) and it came back to life in a couple days just in time to get my phone back. I never mentioned what happened - but i disinfected that thing so it was cleaner than a new phone I imagine....

If you are a woman and carry a purse I suppose you could try some MacGyver stuff with a slip knot in the thread from your sewing kit and something to weight it down with (a sinker) and try to grab the phone and immediately wrap it in TP until you can deal with it... Or if not too far below the surface use an eyeglass case to clamp onto it. OR use two tampons as chopsticks...

But there is probably a 50/50 chance it will never work again anyway so unless it is under warranty it might not be worth it...

Happy Fishin'

i say, bob for that celly, just like you would bob for apples.... haven't you tried fecal water yet?

i dropped a glass bottle of nailpolish in my daughters toilet yesterday. no gloves handy to retreive it and the phone rang. immediately behind me my son drops a 5 gallon bucket of dirty aquarium water down toilet taking the nail polish with it down the pipes and i reckon into our 6 thousand dollar septic system. needless to say i am in the dog house.

help i dont know what to do. north carolina

Ok... I'm really surprised no one 'picked this up'. Why oh why??? G Ras (GRas@PunkAss.com) -- 1.24.2002

"I have grabbed actual poops to examine them" or do I really want to know what "G" is looking for?

Well, the phone was probably damaged by that, anyway, as water and pee and poop juice probably leaked their way into the phone and shorted some of it out (and the water alone would likely have done the job).

Mike

Oh, I mean "(Even the water, alone, would likely have done the job, anyway.)"

If you drop a mobile phone or any other portable electronic device into water based liquids, upon retrieval you should immediately remove the batteries. This is because the water, especially if it contains acids or alkalis, will become an electrolyte in the presence of an electric current, and cause rapid corrosion of the electronic components. You should then dismantle the affected device, clean it thoroughly with distilled water to remove any contaminants and place it to dry in a warm place for a couple of days before re-assembling or use a hairdryer. If the item is badly contaminated then you could use a little detergent and a small brush, but make sure you rinse away all traces of this afterwards. This also applies to electronic equipment that has had liquid spillage.

i just dropped my cell phone in the toilet. the water was clean (the phone was in my pocket and as I pulled down my pants it slipped out of the pocket and into the toilet) so i reached in and pulled out the phone. I took off the battery and dried off all of the water droplets on the phone and then shook out even more water. It's only been about and hour since the incident, will it ever work again???

So I dropped my cell phone (Spring A460) while taking a shit. I reached down when someone was calling me and picked my phone out of my pocket and tried to flip it open with one hand. It then slipped out of my hands and slipped between my legs into the toilet. Luckily, there was a barrier of toilet paper that stopped it from going deep into the toilet into my mess. I grabbed it quicly and then dried it off with lots and lots of paper towels. After it was dried I put the battery back in and tried to turn it on but nothing happened. A few hours later, when I put the battery in it would just vibrate. Another few hours later when I turned the phone on just the display lit up. Then finally at about 9PM, about 10 hours after the incident it started working again!

I once dropped a dime in the toilet when I was a kid and flushed it because I was too afraid to grab it out. The toilet was clean but it was still in public and I thought it was gross. I've always wondered how that dime is doing in the sewers of Rohnert Park, California today.

i got really drunk last night, i had my phone in my front shirt pocket, i ran to the toilet to vomit, after i did while i was leaning over the bowl my phone slipped out landed right in the bowl. It was on when i dropped it, and was on when i got it out, but no buttons would work, will my phone ever work again?

I flushed my phone down the toilet 2 nights ago. It was in my jacket pocket and when I turned around after flushing, it fell out right into the flushing toilet. The plumber retrieved it, but I don't know it still works, or if it can ever be clean enough to use again.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!!!!!
Eeeeeeewwwwwwww!!!!!!!!

Look on the bright side, you can literally "talk shit" on that phone.

Luckily I haven't dropped a cell phone down a toilet pan and I agree that most would be write-offs after such an immersion. I have however dropped my keys down a toilet pan and had to retrieve them. This was in the Men's Toilets at work. I had just done a good solid poo but found that there was no toilet paper on the roll. I reached in my jacket pocket for some tissues I knew I had in there for such an emergency but as I pulled these out my keys came with them and before I could catch them fell with a PLOP! into the toilet pan on top of my big turds. I had no choice but to reach down into the pan and fish out the keys in the process touching the turds. Afterwards I washed both the keys and my hands very carefully indeed and for a lot longer than I usually do and when I got home I soaked the keys in water with some disinfectant-Lysol-in it and also bathed my hands with this before I ate anything.

If the lost item is of high value or as with these house-keys it would be a great inconvenience not to retrieve them then there is little choice but to fish them out. Obviously there is a big difference between a toilet with nothing in it but water, one full of piss, one with solid turds done by someone else and the worst case one full of some else's diarrhea. Apart from the psychological issues the biggest risk would be if you had an open wound on your hands as Hepatitis or HIV could be picked up from the contents of a toilet pan especially in a public toilet of some kind. The more immediate risks if you didn't wash your hands well as we should always do after using the toilet whether for a piss or a poo, is of enteric infections such as Dysentery, Typhoid, Chlolera etc, from hand to mouth.

I do so LOVE this site! Every day I find something different to giggle at in Poop Report history, but this reminds me so much of Glastonbury.

If you're not aware, the UK's Glastonbury Festival is the greatest music festival under the skies, but it also has the most amazing toilets, which force everyone from the most fastidious to the scummiest shitter to lower their standards of personal hygiene. Among them are toilets comprising of a great big septic tank underneath a hole where you put your arse. They're a lot better these days, but at the time, after a couple of days, these are usually so full that a mound of shit and paper would be sticking out of the hole and people would have to crap by hovering above them and making the mound even higher. Unfortunately, for anyone who drops their phone, or anything else for that matter, they haven't a hope of reaching it if the effluent level is still low, and it's one of the funniest things, hearing various ringtones coming from the dark stinking recess beneath...

Well, it was funny until the time when I dropped my fucking keys, which contained my only car key, my house key, the office key and a picture of my daughter on a keyring, which was a present from her. They landed with a jingle and splat, although I estimated that they couldn't have gone very far down because there was hardly any time gap between dropping them and hearing them land, but the problem was, I couldn't see. It was kinda dark, and I'd also just crapped down there myself. With no hope of getting replacements, and no other way of getting home other than my car, I stood there swearing and cursing for a while, frantically trying to flick my lighter in the hole and illuminate matters, but only succeeded in burning my fingers. I tried using the light from my phone screen, but to no avail. The queue outside was huge and although there were many other cubicals, I couldn't leave mine because someone would go straight in and probably crap on top of my keys, but eventually I opened up the door and a young guy came up to take my place. What was I supposed to do? I had to stop him and explain that I'd dropped my keys down there, to which he chuckled and offered his sympathy, but luckily he had one of those mini pocket flashlights with him (always sensible to carry one at Glastonbury, as finding your own tent in the dark while drunk or tripping is sometimes a hell of a task) and offered it to me. I took it gratefully, but it still meant that I had to fish around among the shit until I found them. I had no stick or anything I could hook them with, so, retching as I did so, I kneeled down on the muddy floor (no doubt the mud was largely drunks' piss)and shone the beam down the hole. I could see my keys right on top of a brown and white lump of sodden TP, surrounded by splattery shite, and tried desperately not to be sick as I reached down. I couldn't reach at first and had to almost lean into the hole and stretch my arm, feeling the slimy shit as my hand missed it's target. I can still taste that bile in my throat and the sickening stench now, thinking back on it, but eventually my fingers managed to hook them and I brought my arm out, my hand coated in the most appalling disgusting mess ( as were the keys) and as I opened the door, I had the little torch in one hand and a shitty bunch of keys in the other. The look on the faces of the people directly outside , and the 'Uurgh!' noises is something that haunts me to this day. I offered the torch back to the guy, who was standing outside patiently, but he declined to take it back, as I clearly needed it more than he did....

I washed it all off at the tap, but there's only so much cleansing that running water can do. Eventually I found a burger stall and borrowed their antibacterial surface cleaner, spraying my hands and the keys liberally, but I was still trying not to eat with that hand, or touch my mouth or anything, until I'd had a chance to soak them in dilute bleach the following day. Yuk.

On the plus side though, I did get a chance to smile that following day. It was scorching hot and the septic tanks of the toilets had just been emptied. If you aren't aware, the trucks that do this basically suck it out of the tanks through a big pipe. I'm not sure how, but somehow, when the pipe was disconnected, it accidentally went from 'suck' mode to 'blow' mode, and a good dozen people standing nearby were liberally showered with sewage. Glorious...

Great story. What an experience that must have been! The closest I have ever been to something like that is visiting at some festival where the portapotties have been used to overflowage, which I have seen a time or two.