Friday, April 20, 2007

I Have to Be in Touch With Everyone, All the Time

Um...I don't have a BlackBerry, so maybe I am just being a jerk with this post, but really, if service goes out for 10 hours (which it did recently for 5 million BlackBerry users), can't you just thank your stars that it's 10 hours in which you don't have to CONSTANTLY BE IN TOUCH WITH EVERYONE...?

I'm, frankly, a bit worried about how flipped out everyone gets when any little thing goes wrong with their cell phone, BlackBerry, what have you. Take this quote from the NY Times article on the BB service outage:

Elaine Del Rossi, chief sales officer for HTH Worldwide, an insurance company, reacted to the severed electronic leash with several panicked calls to her office in the belief that the company e-mail system was down.

"I quit smoking 28 years ago," she said, "and that was easier than being without my BlackBerry."

OK, that's just sad.

The article goes on to detail people who freely admit about how completely flipped out they were by this service disruption, panicking, running around their hotel rooms like the building was on fire. A: I love that the NY Times had to run a huge feature on this; B: Get a life, people.

Read a book.

Go see some art.

Go volunteer somewhere.

Catch up on your cleaning.

Listen to some music.

Watch TV.

I don't care. Just do something other than stare at your handheld idiot box with your drool forming at the edges of your open mouth. If you can't handle a BlackBerry blackout, it doesn't exactly bode well for the rest of us when a real tragedy or natural disaster occurs.

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