Holy busted smartphones, Batman! If you or a friend or family member have ever smashed up a smartphone then you'll know all about the exquisite mental (and financial!) discomfort of seeing a £600+ piece of hardware shatter to smithereens in front of your pained eyes.

We all have, or know of, stories of smashed-up smartphones and tablets to share for two reasons. Firstly, no manufacturer has, as yet, introduced a decent touchscreen device that is properly indestructible. Secondly, many humans are, by their very nature, clumsy oafs.

Toilets, baths or sinks seem to feature largely in many tales of iPhone woe, which suggests that some users might well be well-advised to NOT take their phones into the bathrooms with them. Or, if they really want to, perhaps invest in a new Keeep phone holder, specifically designed for toilet texters!

Alternatively, of course you could just bite the bullet and invest in some decent insurance, with lots of alternatives to the pricey bundled deals offered by main mobile networks now on offer, with the likes of the UK’s new personal insurance destination Worry+Peace well worth checking out for a quote. Whoever you buy insurance from, it’s always wise to shop around, read the terms and check the insurers behind the products are worth their salt.

To insure or not to insure?

Still, even if you are nursing a shattered iPhone 6 or have been recently regretting your decision to not buy any insurance because “it’s just a scam” then you can always console yourself by checking out 10 of the downright daftest ways in which people have broken their phones and tablets.

First up, Buzzfeed's recent readers’ poll on the dumbest way in which people had broken a phone threw up a few classics – most involving drunkenness and/or plain ol' stupidity! - including:

"I dropped it in the garbage at work and got marinara sauce all over it. Not even thinking, I washed the phone off in the sink…"

"My phone was in my back pocket and as I pulled my pants down to prepare for my business, the phone flipped out of the pocket and into the toilet, prompting the automatic flusher to engage. I reached in (it was clean water!) and fished it out, but it was too late. The phone was done."

Butter-basting, swan-scares and bread-knifing!

The clumsy confessions just get better (and weirder) as they go on, with the following amongst some of our personal faves:

"I worked at a movie theater and was texting near the popcorn butter machine. A customer came in, and when I looked up, I apparently moved my phone into the machine button, causing butter to pour all over and inside my phone."

"I was on a small boat with my sister, and suddenly a swan came up to us. Both my sister and I got scared, leaned away from the swan, and fell right into the river. My phone was totally destroyed by the water."

"I got drunk and repeatedly hit my phone with a bread knife…"

"I got surprised by a duck and dropped my phone on the gravel driveway."

Anger, stupidity, vanity and dangerous machinery!

In addition to the kind of clownish clumsiness of those situations described above, there are a few other common reasons why smartphones get busted up. We can round these up into four separate sub-groups: anger, stupidity, vanity or deliberate use of dangerous machinery*.

One of our writers managed to drop his new iPhone 6 literally minutes after exiting the O2 store he’d just bought it from. The reason being? He was trying to get it out of the box to fit the protective case, as he was walking down a very busy high street…

Now that’s a hard one to top, for pure stupidity. But there are many other anecdotes and stories of smartphone woe that we’ve heard third hand that come close.

Another writer remembers throwing his mobile at a pavement in extreme anger and frustration over an argument with his girlfriend along the lines of: “Who do you love more? Me or your stupid mobile?” That relationship, amazingly, still flourishes. (The phone, unfortunately, didn’t).

Vanity is also a common deadly sin for the smartphone, with many stories told of users bumping into people, bins, streetlamps and other random street furniture as they are checking out their mush using their smartphone’s front-facing camera.

Finally, if you are of a pyromaniacal bent, you might well want to burn your iPhone with some gasoline or just run over it in a jeep, blend it, dip it in some acid, pop it in the microwave, barbeque it or do a bunch of other utterly daft stuff that’s more or less guaranteed to total it!

*Don’t do this at home, kids. Or anywhere else, for that matter!

Via Greenbot, ZDNet and Buzzfeed

Check out more on gadget insurance from Worry+Peace at our gadget insurance hub.