It's the gadget casualty we see most often. On our bathroom floor, on the pavement (that's a sidewalk to the Americans among you) or in the cold, unforgiving embrace of the kitchen sink - the cracked smartphone screen haunts us day and night.
Shattered mobile screens are so commonplace that many have learnt to live with them. Is a smashed screen evolving into the latest must-have style accessory? For the sake of our poor, bleeding fingers, let's hope not.
Luckily there's a better alternative. Change is in the air in the form of Motorola's new Moto X Force mobile and its shatter-proof screen, which hails a new dawn for butterfingered smartphone devotees.
The mobile, known in the US as the Moto Droid Turbo, boldly claims to have "the world's first shatter-proof smartphone display" thanks to its Moto ShatterShield technology.
The 5.4-inch QHD screen boasts a five layer construction with a scratch-resistant top sheet that users can remove and replace, and the display itself, rather than the phone as a whole, comes with a four-year guarantee. If you crack the screen accidentally (and that's crucial - there are no prizes for the man whose hammer proves Motorola wrong) it'll be replaced for free.
A shatter-proof screen is the holy grail of mobile manufacture. Many of us are dependent on our smartphones from the blast of our morning alarms right through to our pre-bedtime Facebook-flick, so it seems unbelievable that, until now, handset design has had us dragging our fingers back and forth over fractured glass all day.
Apple teased us with Sapphire glass before adding it to their home button and Watch only, and left iPhone screens still prone to accidents. Marcus Frost, senior marketing director for Motorola in EMEA said: "In the past we've innovated just because we can. Now we're attempting to make meaningful innovation, addressing consumer pain points of which battery life and smashed screens are key."
The yearning for smartphones that stand the test of time - in most cases a 24-month contract - has been satisfied by Motorola who sensed (and it'd be hard not to) that our reliance on handsets is making us ever more desperate for glass that doesn't break when it's dropped from elbow height.
As Frost points out, battery life is a customer sore-spot too. According to a 2015 survey of 1,000 UK phone users, 51% of consumers consider battery life to be their number one priority when choosing a new handset. Lucky, then, that the Moto X Force purports to last two days on a single charge - it's a model that seems to answer all our prayers.
When it becomes available in mid-November, however, it's likely to face a cost challenge. Rivals like the HTC One M9 and the LG G4 have been around long enough to take substantial price reductions, while the 64GB Moto X Force comes in at an expensive £534.
We'll have to wait and see if the shatter-proof technology and improved battery life will be enough of a pull to keep sales rolling in, but it's certainly a shame there's not a prototype with built-in anti-theft and loss deterrents or a totally waterproof body.
They might be getting more durable, but smartphones are still our most vulnerable, and most used, gadgets.