In today's world a mobile phone is pretty much an essential piece of kit. Just as you wouldn't have survived the Middle Ages without a trusty sword at your side, you wouldn't do too well in the digital age without a mobile phone. Most of us are aware of this attachment and find ourselves becoming fidgety the minute we can't find our phone - has someone tried to contact us? Do we look rude for not answering? What if we're going to be late? How will we know what's going on at work? Contact our other half? With iPhones and Blackberries this is exacerbated as we find ourselves without a permanent internet connection and object push (the ability to be alerted when a new e-mail comes through). iPhones even give us GPS meaning that we've become dependent on them to find our way around cities and find restaurants or pubs in the area… Simply put they are crucial.

For this reason we need to have arrangements in place for if we damage them, so that it won't be as much of a shock to the system. So what do you do if your phone gets damaged?

Well first of all you should try and remove the SIM card. For those not in the know, the SIM card is actually what contains your phone number and mobile account - and it's not specific to your phone. What this means is that hopefully you'll be able to use the SIM card on another person's phone and that means you won't have to beg for other people's minutes. If you have an old phone in a drawer somewhere at home then you can use that while your main phone is damaged. This then means you won't be completely phone-less (a sad state of affairs) for that time.

Some SIM cards will retain your contacts, but unfortunately others will not be so lucky now that most phones come with reserves of internal storage and SD cards. As such you may find yourself with a phone and no contacts rendering it essentially useless if you need to get hold of someone quickly. The most obvious way to solve this problem then is to write all of your contacts down somewhere else - and better yet on something that you can keep about your person. This way you can refer to your list and type the number in the old fashioned way.

However if you haven't done this then retrospect won't get you far when your communications device does conk out on you. A way to deal with the situation once it's occurred then is to use your other communication resources. This means Facebook, e-mail, twitter and whatever else. If you can get to a cyber café then you might be able to find an e-mail address on the profile of the person you want to contact. Otherwise you can message them or e-mail them. If you can't get to a cyber café, then you can use a payphone to contact someone who does have access to the internet and whose number you know.

Once you're back you will want to recollect your friends' numbers. Again this can be done by creating a Facebook group and inviting all your friends to it, or sending a round robin e-mail to everyone asking them to get in touch with their number.

Finally you should ensure that your phone is repaired as quickly, cheaply and professionally as possible by a trustworthy company so that you can go about repairing your life as soon as possible…