iPhone Fail

My iPhone 5 power button is broken. It happened to one of our iPhone 4s, too, so ... um, Apple, please fix this. Maybe they did with the iPhone 5c/s, but we won't know for some time. But I can no longer simply press the power button to turn the phone off, or hold it down to shut the phone down, and so on. If I press reallllly hard, I might be able to get it to recognize the button.

Yesterday, an app crashed the phone (running iOS 7.0.4), pretty hard. The phone had been acting up for a couple of days, but this app stopped responding, and I could no longer go back to the home screen or any other app. Siri would respond, but I could not get it to open an app. "Open Safari, Siri." "I'm sorry, Pudge, I'm afraid I can't do that." (Paraphrased.)

So I tried to hold down the power button down reallllly hard, so I could slide the phone off. Nothing. I tried to reset with power button and home button, and it took a screen shot, and shortly after ... the screen went blank. The phone wasn't off, the screen was just blank. No backlight. So I backed up the phone with iTunes, and then I figured, well, with no backlight it'll take time to run the battery down, so I'll restore the phone. But I can't do that either, because I have to turn off Find My iPhone first. Which I cannot do because I cannot turn it off by voice and I cannot see the display, even if the phone would let me do it at all.

I tried to connect to it via my laptop, since Personal Hotspot can really bring the battery down, but I had earlier turned it off, and I couldn't turn it back on with Siri. So, "play Tom Petty." It played, and the battery slowly ran down. I was able to connect it to my car stereo and play music through Bluetooth, which would help, but I didn't want to leave the car on.

Later I tried again to reset the phone by holding the power button down reallllly hard, with the home button. Didn't work. Siri activated. I played the music again. I came back later and tried again ... this time, it finally worked, the phone rebooted and I immediately saw the Apple logo.

So much fail. Is it too much to ask for a hole to stick a paper clip in?