It's Labor Day, which means a three day weekend and a house that's way too hot for me to want to do anything productive in it. I spent most of yesterday on the porch with a glass of iced coffee and my laptop, not writing code, just reading. And what I kept reading about, over and over, was Samsung's phone catching fire.
You've probably seen it by now. Samsung put out a recall a few days back on the Galaxy Note 7, the big $849 phablet they'd just launched a couple weeks earlier, after a stack of reports that the things were catching fire while charging. Not "getting warm." Catching fire. There's a video going around of a guy's SUV with the interior melted out because he left one charging on the passenger seat. I don't know if I'd trust that one video completely, but Samsung pulling a recall this fast, on a phone this new, tells you they're not messing around.
Here's the dumb part: I don't even own a Note 7. I've got an older Android phone I've been meaning to replace for a year, nothing close to a Note. And yet I caught myself last night, right before bed, unplugging my phone from the charger on my nightstand and moving it to the dresser across the room instead. Just in case. That's not rational. That's just what a weird news cycle does to your brain at eleven at night.
It reminded me of this MacBook charger I had, must've been 2013 or so, where the cord had frayed right near the plug and you could see a little bit of copper if you bent it a certain way. I used it for months like that because buying a replacement Apple charger felt like an insult on principle (they were like $80 back then for what's basically a wall wart and a cable). One night it actually sparked, this tiny blue flash, while I was plugging it in. Scared the hell out of me. I threw it out that same night and paid the $80 without complaint. So I get the instinct to be paranoid about batteries and cords now, even if my current phone has done nothing wrong.
The other thing that happened this week, and honestly the bigger story if you ask me, barely got talked about next to the phone stuff. A SpaceX rocket blew up on the launch pad in Florida during a fueling test, before they'd even lit the engines. It took out the satellite that was sitting on top of it too, which is the part that stuck with me: that satellite was supposed to help bring internet access to a bunch of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, partly through Facebook's internet.org project. Zuckerberg was literally in Africa that week for a trip tied to this stuff and had to post something on Facebook about how disappointed he was that the satellite didn't make it up. Rockets exploding on the ground, before liftoff even, isn't something that happens often. It's supposed to be one of the more "solved" parts of the whole process.
Anyway. Weird week for things unexpectedly catching fire or blowing up, I guess, whether that's a phone in someone's pocket or a rocket sitting on a pad in Florida. Makes me want to go back to the porch and not plug anything into anything for the rest of the weekend. Except my laptop, obviously, because I still want to finish this post.
I don't have some grand takeaway about battery technology or rocket engineering, I'm not qualified for either. I just keep thinking about how much of my day runs through a battery I never think about until something like this makes the news, and how fast that trust can wobble even when the thing sitting on my nightstand has done absolutely nothing to earn my suspicion. Old habits, I guess. Or new ones, forming in real time because of a headline.
Back to the porch. Long weekend's not over yet.