The One with the Huawei phone rescue

What if your phone could talk? For this sketch, I used a cell phone to narrate a funny incident one sailing day.

Our lives are made up by moments.

Funny ones. Mundane ones. The daily routine ones. Happy ones.

Here’s one stressful moment that occurred on our boat one January day in 2016. The seas weren’t wild, but one unlikely victim managed to get thrown – not overboard – but under the floor board of the front cabin.

The victim was our friend Lisa’s Huawei phone. And it was a newly commissioned unit from work.

Quel nightmare!

After Lisa calmly informed our captain, Nigel, of the mishap, he immediately went into strategic thinking mode with his first mate, Mark (aka Stretch). First, we attempted to fish out the slim gadget using a flattened wine box, a wire hanger and a small hand (mine). But to no avail. Had it been up to me, I would have waited until we were anchored at our bay for the evening to try and retrieve it.

But it was a challenge that piqued Nigel’s problem-solving brain, who decided that some boat manoeuvring was in order. You would think that, by their serious talking, they were getting ready to save a man overboard. Goes to show this crew is in the best of hands if even the smallest of creatures are given so much value.

So let my sketchbook entry speak for itself. It was an exciting day, and I felt that the best way to tell the story was from the Huawei phone’s point of view. Here are tips I used to create this visual story, which I hope you’ll find useful.

1. Start with a title. “The Huawei Rescue” came so easily to me! And since coming up with even a working title helps you write your story with more focus, I suggest you come up with one.
2. Sketch the main character. As my story’s narrator, I immediately sketched the phone with eyes, mouth, arms and legs. Because I put a face to the star of my story, the words came easily to me. My Huawei man reminded me of the Gingerbread Man in the movie Shrek.
3. Dramatise the dialogue. What would a person thrown overboard and then rescued say? I wrote the Huawei’s lines with this in mind.
4. Add humorous touches. I made the Huawei sing “My Way”. I made it cry. I made it evoke joy after being freed from under the floorboards. And I gave it a life vest at the end, as it shared the moral of the story.