Nerf should make phone cases. Cases that can withstand dropping, water and breakage. I’ll take two please, with extra padding.

I use my cell phone for a lot of things: To communicate with others, to check bills and banking and to take photos and write articles. I also use it to write reminder notes to myself. A lot of notes.

The phone has a case. It has held up well, and I wasn’t expecting it to fail. Unfortunately, on a recent rough day at my day job, the phone met the floor. The floor won. Green wavy lines appeared on the phone display. Then a purple stain spread from top to bottom. Finally, after a few hours, the screen went dark.

I keep a backup phone at home. Mostly we use it as a TV remote. I reactivated that phone to use until my primary phone was working again.

I hoped letting the battery drain and be recharged would fix the problem. Universal standard battery time on an unused phone is 2-5 days. On day eight, the battery still had not drained. So I guess my phone battery is an Olympic champion. Finally, on day nine, I was sure it was drained, and I charged it. Still no display.

In the meantime, James and I went on a newspaper assignment. He played games on the backup phone while I took photos with my camera. All was well until I went to do some exterior shots. James tripped on the sidewalk, and the backup phone’s screen cracked. Yippee, two broken phones.

James suggested putting clear tape over the cracked screen. If only I could remember where I hid the tape to keep it out of his hands.

Meanwhile, I tried plugging the no display phone into the computer, to recover the files on it. Nothing happened.

I contacted my daughter’s boyfriend, who explained that if the phone was password protected, I would need to enter the password on the phone before it could upload files. I tried it blind. It didn’t work. Kind of funny, since I can manage a lot of other things half blind.

The frustrating part is that the newer phones are not user-repair friendly. You can’t access any part of the inside of the phone. And you can’t even dial the phone by touching buttons, because they don’t have them. Technology is already outsmarting us.

I had been reluctant to keep two phones activated. At age 8, James is a little too young for a phone, and since the backup worked on wireless at home, the expense seemed unwarranted. I am rethinking this now. Once the phones are repaired, I am going to keep the better one at home during day job hours. It’s not a perfect solution, but it will have to do.

But please, Nerf, can you start making phone cases?