The man in the phone repair shop smiled all too confidently and told me that there was nothing I could present him with that he couldn’t fix. ‘That’s good,’ I said, holding out my smashed phone.
But what I wanted to say was: ‘I am a hapless person who jinxes things. You may think this is just another straightforward job, but I want to give you fair warning before you take me on that nothing to do with dealing with me will be straightforward, and you will probably end up throwing me out of your shop. I am neurotic, added to which I have an otherworldly curse on me when it comes to technology, which makes everything malfunction.’
I did not say this, because I badly wanted my smashed phone screen replacing. The builder boyfriend was away in London with his cheque from the car accident insurance payout, shopping around for a new pick-up truck.
I had just come back from dropping him at Cork airport and was wandering about the house with nothing to do except peruse the sheet of instructions he’d left me on how to top up the boiler, complete with diagram, which made the heating system look like something Willy Wonka had invented.
Feeling bored and ill at ease without him, I checked my phone to see if he had texted me, fumbled it, threw it up in the air and screamed as it smacked back down on to the tiled kitchen floor with a sound that told me there was no way the screen wasn’t done for.
It was smashed to a degree that I could still just about use the phone to text the BB to tell him I had smashed my phone, and he suggested that I take it to the nearest big village, where there is a little shop advertising ‘Screen repair’.
Feeling sorry for this shop in advance, I walked into it to find two fellows, one with flowing hair and a long mysterious beard like a wizard, standing behind high counters fixing things.
The guy I took to be the owner was handing over the oldest landline telephone I had seen in years, which he had evidently repaired, to an old Irish lady who paid him in coins she counted out before hobbling away with the telephone trailing its leads over the floor.
I held out my smashed iPhone and made a pleading face, and that was when he said there was no problem, and nothing they couldn’t fix. It would be 40 minutes.
‘Forty minutes?’ I asked incredulously.
‘Yep. Do you want to go and have a coffee?’
Have a coffee, you say. There was a café over the road. I glanced over at it doubtfully. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to leave it with you for the day?’
‘No no. It’ll be half an hour, 40 minutes tops.’ So I left him and his bearded colleague with my phone and went across the road to an old-fashioned drapers for a browse of the checked shirts, quilted jackets and bed covers. Then I went to the hardware store. Then I looked at my watch and the 40 minutes were up.
Fine, I thought. I suppose it’s possible. And I walked back across the road and into the little phone repair shop.
The bearded man was the one evidently attempting to change the screen on my iPhone, for it was him who looked close to tears. The other guy looked up nervously as I entered and tried to affect cheerfulness. He said it wasn’t quite ready. He finished helping an old lady allow her Samsung to install updates as she looked at it as though it were a time machine, then he came out from behind his counter and asked me if I smoked.
I don’t smoke any more, but I can do, if needs be. So as he pushed a packet of cigarettes at me looking desperate, I said ‘Sure, why not?’ and he got one out and lit it for me. We stood in the doorway for a while, smoking as I wondered when he was going to break it to me. There was a nice gallows camaraderie between us.
It was a bit like we were soldiers on the Western Front and only cigarettes were going to dull the pain.
Every now and then he would look nervously back to his bearded friend who was sweating behind his counter.
‘Do you want to give up on it? You can, you know,’ I told the pair of them as we went back inside the shop.
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‘No!’ said the owner. ‘No! We fix everything in here. It’s what we do. There is not a phone we cannot fix. We will make it work!’
‘Righto,’ I said. But the bearded man now looked like Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’.
He called the other one over, and whispered to him. The owner said they would need another hour. I decided to go home.
I left it until 5 p.m. to drive back to the shop. The bearded man was nowhere to be seen. The owner was alone, his old bonhomie gone. He told me my phone screen was replaced but they couldn’t get the home button to work. The other guy was ‘very upset’, he said. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
He had ordered a part which would be in tomorrow. I could take the phone with me, for now, because it did at least make calls, then come back tomorrow so they could complete the repair.
I thanked him profusely and went back out to my car, turned the ignition one notch without starting the engine, and plugged in my phone. I sat for a few minutes charging and trying to check messages, then turned the ignition to start the car and realised what I had done. I walked back into the shop.
As I entered, the man recoiled. ‘You’ll never guess!” I said as cheerfully as I could. ‘I need a jump start! But don’t worry, I have leads…’ and I waved the jump leads I had taken from the back of my car, where the BB insists I keep them because I do this so often.
Hunched in the rain over my car engine, a blank look on his face as he connected the leads from my battery to his car, the once fearless repair man was getting the measure of me.
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