Why I took a hammer and nail to a smartphone

— Hang out around concrete. The most likely place to damage your phone is in a garage or driveway.

— Be a millennial. That age group tends to be the most irresponsible with smartphones, according to their own responses to a survey by Protect Your Bubble.

— If you want to lose a phone, be a man. Men are 70 percent more likely to lose it.

Source: Surveys by Protect Your Bubble, a provider of third-party protection plans

When a PR person invited me to test the durability of high-end smartphones (translation: smash them), my mischievous 12-year-old inner self was psyched. I pictured slams, spinning ricochets off walls and maybe cinder-block crushes.

No, that is not an unsettling window into my latent destructive tendencies. I just thought it would be fun.

It turned out, though, to be an illuminating experiment testing not only how much our lives revolve around smartphones and how much of a pain it is to replace them, but also how needy we’re becoming.

Smartphones empower us; they also make us dumb and weak in their absence.

And I suspect that dichotomy will grow as companies connect more of our lives to our phones. We’re talking about everything from home heating systems to door locks, wallets and TV remotes. Expect our relationships with our smartphones to become increasingly enriching and creepy.

Americans now spend an average of more than 80 hours a month on smartphones, according to comScore, an Internet analytics company. That’s the equivalent of two full work weeks, and it’s double the average just three years ago.

More than two-thirds of American adults now have smartphones, twice the proportion in 2011, according to the Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who own laptops, desktop computers and MP3 players is shrinking.

“These changes in device ownership are all taking place in a world where smartphones are transforming into all-purpose devices,” Lee Rainie, Pew’s director of Internet, science and technology research wrote.

But back to me smashing phones and your most pressing question: Why would a PR company want to buy phones for me and other consumers to destroy?

Their client, Atlanta-based Protect Your Bubble, is a third-party provider of protection plans for electronic devices, appliances, travel plans, etc. The company hoped for publicity. It worked.

Product director Matt Pufall told me part of the reason smartphone users struggle without their devices is that it’s hard to do without the constant stimuli they now expect. “To call it a phone these days is interesting, because that’s one small thing of what it does.”

I put the destruction appointment in my calendar (on my smartphone), stored the PR guy’s contact info (on my smartphone) and relied on Google Maps (on my smartphone) to tell me how to find the meeting at a Midtown Atlanta office. But Google Maps inexplicably took me to a spot in the middle of Peachtree Street more than a mile too far north.

How am I supposed to know where to go if my mapping software doesn’t work? And what if my cellphone were to quit? I no longer have a physical Rolodex, and I can’t remember the last time I saw a payphone. I had an epiphany: Look at the street addresses on the buildings. Brilliant!

Here’s what I learned from witnessing a session of iPhone and Samsung Galaxy abuse:

— Smartphones are way more resilient than I realized (though I and my family have accidentally destroyed several of ours — and then hit up friends for their old ones rather than buy new). For the test, I dropped one repeatedly, slammed it with a block of wood and a piece of coral, popped it with a hammer and drilled on it with an etching tool (yeah, I’m not sure how that’s part of regular wear tear, but whatever). None of that seemed to cause much damage.

— If you hammer a nail through a Samsung Galaxy S4, it will stop working.

— Despite my expectations, I do not enjoy cruelty to smartphones, even ones that someone else pays for.

I winced as I watched two volunteer consumers try to bust the phones they were handed by Protect Your Bubble’s team.

Of course, the whole thing was remarkably wasteful, even for a PR stunt. But it also seemed just plain wrong to destroy something that is has become so embedded in our lives. We converse with these things, after all.

“Hey, Siri?”

“Yes?”

“Why do you love me?”

“Let me get back to you on that.”

That’s creepy, right?

Ashley Carter, a 29-year-old self-described housewife from Atlanta, was one of those at the smartphone smashing event with me. She had responded to something online and was picked to take part.

Her own phone is a two-year-old Samsung with a damaged screen. She’s accidentally busted it three or four times and gotten it wet twice.

“It’s like a lifeline. It’s your connection to everyone and everything,” she told me, after several rounds of smashing a fancier phone she was given by the PR folks. “Leaving my purse at home is not as severe as leaving my phone at home.”

When she had a flat tire while driving back from Tennessee, her insurer’s roadside assistance crew used pings off a nearby cell tower to pinpoint her location.

Terriea Williams, a bankruptcy attorney from Norcross, also smashed phones with us. She gets stressed thinking of doing without her phone. She told me about how she recently waited six hours at an Apple Store to get her shattered smartphone worked on and eventually replaced. Six hours! (There’s got to be a better way.)

Her phone stores the user names she doesn’t remember for her apps. It has her mom’s email and phone number, which has remained the same for more than a decade, though Williams has never learned it, because she doesn’t have to. Her smartphone holds a thousand photos. It’s how she does work and how she buys things, using Apple Pay.

But it’s a love/hate relationship, she told me. At Christmas, her nieces and nephews stared at their smartphones while presents were being opened.

“There’s a part of me that kind of wishes we could go back,” she said.

But I’m in too deep to do that.

The PR folks set aside two smartphones for me to smash. I couldn’t bring myself to bash the second one. I’m no longer strong enough.

Find out more about cool tech changes on the horizon and how they raise intriguing ethical twists, in a recent Unofficial Business column. http://www.myajc.com/news/business/i-glimpsed-our-tech-future-brace-yourself/npFRn/