Nothing is worse than a broken smartphone
I want to take a break from the normal news, reviews, and root tips, so I can just vent for a little bit. To a tech geek like me, who takes his phone everywhere and uses it for everything, who treats his phone like a baby, who gets bothered by any minor chip or scratch that literally no one else in the world will notice … there is literally nothing worse than a broken smartphone.
Can you guess what happened to my phone last weekend?
On Saturday night, I had a few friends over, and we were hanging out in the backyard. One of those friends had borrowed my phone to make a quick phone call, and within the blink of an eye the phone went from her hand to the concrete driveway below, although I actually remember it happening in slow motion. I can’t really describe the feeling I had in the pit of my stomach in the minutes and hours following this, but I will say I was practically ready to vomit.
“But John,” you might ask, “Don’t you keep your phone protected in a bulky military-grade case that adds several inches and pounds to the phone, like all the iSheep do with their iPhones?”
Of course not! I baby my phones, treating them with extreme care. Why would I want to ruin the hand-holding experience that so many engineers poured so many months of their lives into? I’ve never done serious damage to any phone. I’ve never experienced a cracked screen before. It’s unnecessary.
Or so I thought.
So here I am, with a shattered screen, waiting for my replacement to arrive. (Luckily, my friend offered to pay the full cost of replacement – around $435 for a new 32GB Nexus 5 from the Google Play Store. Not many people would be willing to do that. I’m lucky my friends also happen to be nice people.)
“So John,” you may ask, “Have you learned your lesson about protecting your future phones?”
If by that you’re asking whether or not I’m going to cover my devices in huge, ugly cases, my answer is still a resounding “NO!” But if you mean to ask whether or not I will ever let someone else touch any piece of technology that I own ever again, my answer will be, “Hands off. I’ve learned my lesson. You stay away.”
