My current (I think I am now on my second or third replacement) Parker 25 pen broke in the most unexpected way this afternoon.

I was holding it between finger and thumb on my left hand after coming in from my latest walking trip (during which I had achieved the grand total of half a sentence of Roland de Céligny in the space of about ten minutes) while I fumbled to get out and use the door-key with my other hand, and it just went weirdly wobbly. I don't think I was putting all that much pressure on it, but when I managed to get indoors and put down my bag, violin, etc. and take a proper look I found that the plastic nib unit had snapped right through at the point where it screws into the metal barrel. In fact I had some difficulty in extracting the remaining stub, which was still firmly screwed in and flush with the end of the barrel!
In forty years I've never seen a pen fail like *that* -- I'm afraid I think it must have fractured at some point when dropped on an earlier occasion (I do remember dropping it fairly recently, although it was firmly capped at the time and has always been fine when that happened before).
I still have the old nib from the previous pen, so have switched back to that for the moment (I now have quite a graveyard of barrels and caps in varying states of batteredness), but it is pretty scratchy :(
( Camera battery )
( Cycle computer )

I was holding it between finger and thumb on my left hand after coming in from my latest walking trip (during which I had achieved the grand total of half a sentence of Roland de Céligny in the space of about ten minutes) while I fumbled to get out and use the door-key with my other hand, and it just went weirdly wobbly. I don't think I was putting all that much pressure on it, but when I managed to get indoors and put down my bag, violin, etc. and take a proper look I found that the plastic nib unit had snapped right through at the point where it screws into the metal barrel. In fact I had some difficulty in extracting the remaining stub, which was still firmly screwed in and flush with the end of the barrel!
In forty years I've never seen a pen fail like *that* -- I'm afraid I think it must have fractured at some point when dropped on an earlier occasion (I do remember dropping it fairly recently, although it was firmly capped at the time and has always been fine when that happened before).
I still have the old nib from the previous pen, so have switched back to that for the moment (I now have quite a graveyard of barrels and caps in varying states of batteredness), but it is pretty scratchy :(
( Camera battery )
( Cycle computer )