Have you ever dropped your phone while taking a selfie? It sucks, and you’re silently thinking “Oh God please don’t be broken” the entire time you’re looking for it. Eventually, if you manage to retrieve it, you are thankful and vow to never drop it again – a vow you keep for maybe a couple of months until you drop it again while scrambling to silence it during a meeting.
Some folks, though, just count their losses and move on. Maybe they get another phone, maybe they just go off the grid. Whatever the case may be, they don’t freak out if they lose their phone.
But some folks are Rajesh Vishwas, a government official in India who went above and beyond to get his lost phone.
While taking a selfie at the Kherkatta Dam, located in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, Vishwas dropped his phone. It promptly fell into the reservoir, and since it was an expensive Samsung (roughly $1,200 U.S. dollars), he couldn’t go without it.
After local divers failed to find it, he paid for a diesel pump to be brought in, Mr Vishwas said in a video statement quoted in Indian media.
He said he had verbal permission from an official to drain “some water into a nearby canal”, adding that the official said it “would in fact benefit the farmers who would have more water”.
The pump ran for several days, emptying out roughly two million litres (440,000 gallons) of water – reportedly enough to irrigate 6 sq km (600 hectares) of farmland.
His mission was stopped when another official, from the water resource department, arrived following a complaint.
Vishwas has been suspended from his duties while an inquiry is underway. He claims he did not cause any harm because the water was in the overflow portion of the reservoir and was unusable water. The government seems to not care as government equipment was brought in to engage in a major and expensive project solely to retrieve the phone.
Which, by the way, was too soaked to work any longer.
It should be noted that anyone with any concept of how phones work would know that even the most water-resistant phones won’t work if submerged deep underwater for days. It should also be noted that his claim that the phone had “sensitive government data” wouldn’t mean much if the phone was too soaked to use.
This could be a simple case of a government official using all of the power given to him to complete a meaningless task. Bureaucracies gonna bureaucracy, and all that. But the panicked response of hiring divers and then draining the entire damn reservoir makes me think something way funnier is at play, like a government official so desperate to keep an affair hidden that he is willing to abuse his power to get a water-logged phone back.
That may not be the case at all, and this guy is just not bright, but man, that would be hilarious, and I kind of hope that’s the case.