The risk you took so your gay friends could get married.

If you’ve been following Friendfactor (or, you know, the news) for the past few months, you probably know that New York passed an historic bill last month granting your gay friends the freedom to marry. On Sunday, the law will go into effect, and hundreds of couples around the state will be turning out to exercise their hard-earned right to put a ring on it. But there were a lot of other rings that had to happen first — namely, those made by the phones in NY State Senators’ offices.

What you may not have known was that the tens of thousands of people who called their legislators about this issue were placing themselves at significant personal peril to do so: MSNBC reports that a shocking 19% of smartphone users admit to having dropped their phones in the toilet. So every time you dropped a line to stick up for your gay* friends’ rights, you were putting yourself at even greater risk for dropping something valuable down the great white way.

Sure, not everybody who used our Friend-setter tool to call their State Senator used a smart phone to do it, but assuming the “disastrously dropped call” rates are similar for regular cell phone users, we estimate that since over 8,000 calls were generated through the Friendfactor site, more than 1,500 of you really took one for the team, even if that action wasn’t directly connected with the act of participating in this great democracy. In a way, we must admit, we sort of love these numbers… Friendfactor is all about equality, and T.S. Eliot did famously refer to the water closet as “the place where everyone goes!”

Happy weekend and marriage equality to all!