How do I get my phone working again?

Hard to say with it going through the wash. Over Christmas, I dropped my Samsung vibrant in the toilet and it freaked out / would not come on for 2 days. I have run my IPOD through the wash and it was dead for 4 months and one day decided to come back on.

does it have a SIM card? if so, some of the info may be on there such as contacts, files, etc. you should be able to put it into a new headset to retrieve that. if thats not the case, then you may need to have someone go in blind + interface with the phone to grab stuff off of it. i had to do this numerous times when i bricked my iphone trying to jailbreak it.

if you do manage to salvage the content, make sure to back it up locally (via usb or similar cable) or better yet OTA (over the air) to google contacts or something similar.

is it the a877? try turning it on and hooking it up to your computer….to retrieve the wanted files…

I second the recommendation to hook it to a computer and try to recover the contents. It sounds like you did everything right, but the success rate on those tricks is not 100%.

@963chris Not all phones store contact info on their SIM cards. I had to explicitly tell my Samsung Trance to do so or else it would store them in the phone’s memory. Also, IIRC, only GSM phones use SIM cards whereas CDMA phones (like my Droid X) do not; they use MicroSD cards. Thankfully Verizon automatically backs up Contact info, but I don’t think that practice is universal, and it doesn’t help with other data.

Rice trick may take several days to “suck out” moisture. It does not always work, also take battery out and put both in rice.