They say that if you encounter a large, hostile animal in the middle of nowhere, you should shoot it. If that doesn’t work, shoot it again. And if that doesn’t work, you should start running like hell, because you’ve just pissed off something that you can’t kill. Today, we’ve stumbled upon the smartphone of such a beast.
Indeed, a trip to the Grand Canyon for TikTok‘s @sunnyst3ph became the greatest test of might in the history of communications technology when her smartphone went tumbling over the side of the cliff, rolling and bouncing off of who knows how many surfaces as it plummeted to what should have been its death. But, somehow, someway, it not only survived the fall, but kept recording the entire ordeal, including when a young family happened upon the impossibly functional device.
The phone’s saviors, consisting of a man, a woman, and a mystified little girl, seemingly happened upon the phone just moments after it ended its journey, since they didn’t realize at first that its peculiar habitat was only claimed that day. Moreover, judging by their banter, retrieving the phone was this family’s way of paying their own good fortune forward, as the woman claims that the man lost his own phone whilst ziplining not too long ago, only getting it back through the goodwill of some strangers who happened upon it and brought it to a Lost-And-Found of sorts.
The little girl wanted to keep it, but the two adults made the very responsible choice of not giving a small child the keys to not only someone else’s property, but what can only be a piece military grade technology that could very easily be weaponized if fitted with the right contraption.
Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” There’s no actual proof that he said this, but we now know how inaccurate that prediction is; indeed, should the whole of our planet ever become intimate with the unthinkable devastation of nuclear warfare, the next major conflict in our history will be fought not just with sticks and stones, but also with the remaining models of Steph’s phone.
Verizon will, in turn, become the next world superpower by enabling such an arms race, and the generations that will come after the rise of that empire will eventually evolve to have Bluetooth written into their DNA. God bless America.
