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Last night I dropped my iPhone. It’s been dropped before, but this was onto a tiled floor. Initial inspection showed nothing was wrong so I thought nothing of it… until today.

Today I noticed I wasn’t getting any bleeps or clicks from my phone when the headphones weren’t in, plus it was also do some weirdness of starting to play songs when I plugged the headphones in. Closer inspections showed that the iPhone thought the headphones were plugged in even when they weren’t. Normally this is a simple fix. Plug the headphones in again, then remove them. This didn’t work. So I tried a reboot. This didn’t work. Perhaps a full restore, but I was at work so that would have to wait. To check the speaker I tried ringing the phone (the ringer rings through the speaker and the headphones). It goes to voice mail. Check phone, has signal. Try again. Voice mail. Start to wonder if this has something to do with the phone being dropped. I start thinking of a life before the iPhone. I can’t recall much, just some memory of a dark time. Decided there was no life before iPhone and rumors that there was are being spread by naysayers and non believers. Try phoning office phone from iPhone. That works. Call number back. Phone rings. So, just no sounds when headphones not plugged in. I can live with that.

Get home, offer up a prayer to Google. I am told:

• Plug in and unplug headphones. Done that.
• Restart phone. Done that.
• Try resetting all settings. Oooh, don’t want to do that, would rather do a full restore.
• Do full restore. Right, looks like the way forward.
• Clean out headphone socket. Now there’s something I’ve not tried.

The instructions say ‘cut the fat bit off a q-tip and use that to clean inside the headphone jack’. It also says that the Apple stores use compressed air to clean them. I’ve got Johnson’s cotton bud thingies so I try cutting the fat bit off… and the end falls off (newfangled plastic ones). I cut the other end off carefully. Won’t fit. trim a bit more. Falls off. So I’m left with a small plastic tube… I know, lets try blowing through the tube into the headphone socket. You know what, it only worked

So the iPhone appears to be alive again, I can sleep easy and all is good with the world. Actually, all it not good with the world, but that’s another issue.