We have all been there. Phone in your shirt pocket and you lean over to inspect something on the toilet wall. Woosh the phone falls out and clatters down the toilet. Surely it’s not just me? Anyway SquareTrade are a mobile phone insurance company and they have decided to hold their own version of the Darwin awards. For peculiar ways in which phones get destroyed. I am sure that they have had a few shirt pocket toilet incidents! They have sent us the current top five and they are asking for more details about how you destroyed your phone on their Facebook page.
Here are SquareTrade’s top five:
- Not-so-spontaneous smartphone combustion: in first place, a man who dropped his phone into the fire while playing about with a fireplace. Sadly a fire blanket and resuscitation were not enough to save the phone.
- Death-by-turbine: for reasons unknown, the owner drops his phone 200ft from the top of a wind turbine. It was pronounced dead at the scene.
- Male mishaps: user lost concentration while busy with his phone with one hand at a urinal. The other hand didn’t catch it.
- The Texas lawnmower massacre: in this case the phone dropped from the owner’s pocket whilst maintaining his lawn and herb garden, only to meet its fate with a Flymo.
- Dangerous Dog act: phone mauled and digested by Rover along with a throw blanket. It then exited through the opposite end a week later, in cheetah print strips.
The Darwin Awards are granted to those who have died in extraordinarily unfortunate circumstances. Entries into SquareTrade’s Mobile Phone Darwin Awards ranged from damage caused by common road accidents, such as phones being run over, to washing machine related incidents to the more bizarre incidents like mistakenly dunking it into coffee.
“Our Darwin Awards are of course a bit of fun, but underneath there is that clear message that these devices are highly susceptible to damage and this extends so much further than the classic drops and spills,” said Vince Tseng, managing director of SquareTrade UK.
“Clearly mobile devices are increasingly central to our day-to-day lives, with Gartner quoting total smartphone sales in 2011 having reached 472 million units. If we’re exposing them to every activity we do, then we need to be prepared for the repercussions such as accidental damage…or rogue lawnmowers.”
SquareTrade is inviting phone owners to top their list by posting their own phone stories and photos on SquareTrade’s Facebook page.
So if you have destroyed your phone in a huge way head over to their facebook page and let them now how. You could also post details in the comments below. Heck you could even start a new topic in our Forum about it.