“To be rude, if I were single I would not date someone with a broken screen.” Speaking to my editor about writing this story, I expressed how confusing it was that my phone had become such a blight. “I think everyone should always fix their screens unless you are in severe financial hardship,” Kate Knibbs said some months back. Colleagues told me I was undatable as a grown adult with a job who walks around with a cracked iPhone. “Ten billion,” known jerk David Pierce replied. I polled Twitter recently after a rash of complaints about my phone, asking exactly how ashamed I should be of my shattered screen on a scale of 1 to 10. What I thought was merely a minor blemish on an otherwise functional tool is more like a gaping wound to everyone else. Connect the dots at your leisure.) Apparently digital loyalty, no matter the state of a device, is appreciated only by Drake, because the rest of the world has given me nothing but grief over the state of my iPhone. (Note: I live in Portland, run around with a cracked iPhone, and punctually return texts. “My side girl got a 5s with the screen cracked / Still hit me back right away, better not never hesitate,” Drake raps on “Portland,” a track from his latest release More Life. A repairman named Bill is coming to fix it this morning. When I ran my skin over the most deeply creviced areas, the minuscule slivers pulled away from the surface and became lodged, like splinters - surely a sign that it was time to do something about the screen.

The shattered phone, whose cracks had been slowly growing more spiderweb-like and acquiring new routes along the glass, was beginning to chip so badly that my thumb was occasionally left red and raw. When that crystalline shard appeared, I decided to fix my iPhone screen. It was around the time of the third micro-sliver.

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