“In other words, the things people actually do to their phones,’’ LaRose said as she waited in Ingram’s Brighton shop for him to take a look at hers, which was still misbehaving weeks after the toilet bowl incident.
Apple’s “Genius Bar’’ handles each accident on a case-by-case basis, and the company is known for replacing broken phones for free, even though it is not obligated to do so. But there are still enough people walking out of Apple stores with bad news - often that they need to buy a new phone - that Ingram’s business is booming.
His second-floor studio in Brighton Center is a comic cross between an old watchmaker’s shop, an emergency room, and a therapist’s office, complete with a couch and a cat. In this growing age of smartphone dependence, the 45-year-old Ingram says, a broken iPhone is an emotionally stressful problem that must be fixed, immediately.
“There are lots of people who won’t leave the room while we’re working on their phones,’’ he said. “They’re so attached to their phone they don’t know what to do without it.’’
Ingram, who has the wholesome handsomeness of a cartoon quarterback, has become a mini-celebrity in Brighton, which is known for, among other things, young people behaving like young people. “I always get recognized in bars,’’ he said; that’s also where a lot of his business originates.
“I had a whiskey in one had and my phone in the other, and we were running for the T and I slipped on some snow,’’ Jacob Anderson, a graduate student at nearby Boston College, said recently as he waited for Ingram to replace the shattered screen of his iPhone4 for $100. “But I saved my drink. I have priorities.’’
There are, Ingram will tell you, many ways to break an iPhone. But there are a few that come up over and over again. At the top of that list are women who drop it into a toilet, and the story almost always goes like this: They had it in a back pocket and it slid out when they sat down. This happened to his girlfriend and business partner, Amy Rubin, when they were at Ingram’s parents’ house.
