This certainly gives new meaning to the term “dropped call”…. I was doing a large photoshoot of 250 accountants in Tower City in Cleveland. They were postioned on the grand staircase at one end of the atrium while I was two floors above them on a mezzanine level. My assistant was down on their level and was directing them as we talked via our cellphones. I was using my 3G iPhone, which doesn’t grip the best when wedged between a shoulder and your ear, while two cameras were dangling from my shoulders. In any event, everything was going well and we got six shots completed in a matter of a few minutes. Just as I was in the process of telling him that we were done, I dropped the call…literally as well as figuratively. The phone slipped from my shoulder and in a flash, it was taking a giant swan dive, over the railing, bouncing off the top of a directory kiosk and then smashing onto the marble mall floor, some 32 feet below.

Luckily no people were anywhere close underneath me. Looking over the railing, I was surprised to see the phone still in one piece. Even more surprising, the screen was still shining. How could that be??? I had the phone in a Griffin Clarifi case and it actually took the impact, cracking off one small corner of its plastic case, but completely protecting the iPhone itself. The screen displayed white only, so I couldn’t see my icons, but the case wasn’t scratched in the slightest.

That evening I took the phone to my local Apple Store and within 3 minutes, the tech replaced the screen and my phone was back working again. No lost data, just like nothing had happened. Thank you Griffin and thank you Apple. It makes all those dropped calls somehow more palatable now.