I guess, (I wasn’t the one who saw it) my iPod floated by the glass window of the front loader almost in slow motion.  Like that scene in Stuart Little when Gena Davis finds Stuart swimming in the washer.  It was promptly pulled out, but the damage was done.  The rubber cover had all four edges ripped from the banging, some of the silver finish had even worn off of the unit itself, and water got inside, evident from the bubble behind the glass front.

The battery was already dead so I didn’t have to worry about trying to turn it on.  (Apparently this was actually a good thing that I’ll explain later.)  I figured the thing was fried so I just let it sit on the counter to dry out.  During this time I researched online knowing I wasn’t the first to soak my pod.

I discovered a few important things.  First, there is a water damage indicator at the bottom of the headphone jack.  It turns red when exposed to water and Apple will check this first to simply deny any warranty work.  Secondly, if the battery is dead there is little chance of electrical damage.  Third, don’t try to charge, use, plug in, turn on, or do anything for at least a week and a half.  Finally, expect to do a firmware restore.

Well, I’m sure you would all like to hear the day by day (which I still remember in detail) but I’ll summarize for you.  My water indicator was red while it should be white.  I let it sit for 12 days without trying to do anything.  I put it in the charger and it turned on and started charging, but the battery meter never moved and as soon as I tried to do anything it locked up.  Not to mention there was about 1/2 of the screen that looked funny as if there was water behind the LCD.  The iTunes restore didn’t work, maybe because it was jailbroken, but when I manually entered recovery mode I was able to restore it.  When all was said and done, about 2 weeks after the bath, everything was working except the WiFi.  I got a grey WiFi button under settings that say “No WiFi”, which appears to mean there was a hardware failure.

So I wrote off my iPod since without WiFi it was kind of useless.  I continued to use it once in a while to listen to music and stuff but I wasn’t carrying it around with me.  Then the other day, it was an iPod miracle! I turned it on to update some music the old fashon way (via iTunes) and a box asked me to join the wireless network.

So it took three weeks but my iPod is back to new.  Everything is working and I loaded the new 2.0 firmware on it.  The app store is great and with wireless working I’m sure I’ll be carrying it around again.  Also, amazingly, I don’t think I am going to jailbreak it again.  I don’t see the need since all the apps I used (so far) are on the app store.

Kudos to apple for making a good product and some nice software! A drastic difference from what I was saying about apple a week or so ago.