See Jane Fix: Seattle woman teaches others how to repair iPhones

I’ll always contend that it was Apple’s master plan to make a phone out of glass that everyone would want and that everyone would break.

We can send humans into outer space but we can’t have phones that are shatter-proof. If you’re like most Americans, you have a smart phone and you’ve splintered the screen during one unfortunate slip-of-the-hand.

If you like to live dangerously, you didn’t buy insurance for your phone. So Apple says they’ll replace it for half the original cost. Or you go online to see if you can fix it yourself for about $150 and decide you’re not cut out for open-phone surgery.

That’s when you pick up the veritable tech “bat phone” and call Alex McConnehey.

“I have not always been so tech oriented. I actually managed to break three iPhones in one month while I was back in college, so most of my friends really laughed when they found out that I’d gotten into this line of work,” said McConnehey.

McConnehey is the owner of “See Jane Fix” which started as a one-woman show of fixing broken phones and has exploded into a business with employees in just four months because we all break our phones.

“I actually do repairs that most people in Seattle won’t do,” said McConnehey. “I have a soldering iron and I get referrals from other companies that are like, ‘Oh this person has this charging port.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I can fix that.'”

What’s different about “See Jane Fix” is that she doesn’t want fixing a phone to be a mystery. She’ll sit down with you, one-on-one, and show you how to fix your phone so that the next time it goes crashing onto the pavement, empowerment takes the place of horror.

McConnehey said Apple products, above all, seem difficult to fix.

“They try to make it nearly impossible. The only really two special screws are the two screws on the bottom of that phone and the rest is a Phillips head. So Apple tried to make it difficult to get into the phone but most people are pretty smart and can jimmy-rig something to open up their phones. It’s really a matter of a kind of confidence and willingness to take your time,” said McConnehey.

The most common damage she sees is a cracked screen. Second to that is water damage and it’s not the water that ruins your phone, but the corrosive materials in the water.

“Everyone out there, if you drop your phone in the pool or the ocean, dump fresh water on your phone, or you can just dump alcohol on it or liquor, I kid you not, because you just want to get all the salt and chlorine out as quickly as possible,” McConnehey said.

She says if you drop your phone into water, don’t turn it on.

“All that stuff is drying to the board and so the phone gets turned on, the phone is nice and toasty and it’s drying up that water quicker and it’s kind of expediting the process of your phone’s eventual death,” McConnehey said.

As a history major in college, McConnehey never saw herself as a leader in the tech industry. Now that she is, she wants to empower other women (and men) to do the same.

“I didn’t think I would be interested in tech until I was actually doing it, until I had the opportunity to be like, ‘Oh wait a second!’ There was something really empowering about the first time I actually fixed my phone. ‘Oh, this isn’t all smoke and mirrors. This isn’t scary.’ I think there’s just not that many spaces where women have the opportunity to explore what possible interest they might have in the tech sectors.”

McConnehey created her own space for those opportunities and just held her first phone-fixing workshop with more planned.

Because, she says, if there’s one thing you can count on, “There are a lot of broken phones out there. I think one of the current statistics is that half of all iPhone users under the age of 35 will break their phone at least once.”

You can find McConnehey at SeeJaneFix.com and listen to my full interview with her on my podcast, “We Think” at KIRORadio.com.