Crackberries

Posted on September 30th, 2008 by Your Aunt Becky

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A couple of weeks ago, I found myself shopping for the last thing in the world I’d ever expected to be shopping for. Shockingly, it wasn’t the mini-van we test drove. No. It was something even more shame-provoking and cool-reducing than that (if that even sounds remotely possible!).

That’s right, my sweet and sexy Internet, I looked into buying a BLACKBERRY.

Big deal, right? I’m sure some of you are saying. I have mine, I’ve had it since dinosaurs roamed the planet and I couldn’t live without it. It’s my right arm AND my left arm.

And to all of you, I stick my tongue out and blow a large raspberry in your general direction.

Kool-Aid drinkers.

I’ve mocked Blackberries since I saw the first Business Professional Douche-Bag talking into what appeared to me to be a wallet. Having recently come from my Mental Health Rotation, I was actually wondering if the guy was psychotic until I looked at his uber-shiny leather shoes. Nope, not crazy.

I was incensed well before The Daver drank the (work) Kool-Aid and brought one home from work himself. Here is a device that has made it socially acceptable to–while out to dinner and engrossed in conversation with a Real! Live! Person!–whip out a wallet sized menace and CHECK YOUR EMAIL.

I don’t know about you, and maybe it’s just jealousy on my part, but the emails that I do tend to get on a day-to-day basis fall into one of two categories:

1) Chatting with friends. Simple emails, usually, a couple of lines, asking something specific or just saying howdy. Obviously not urgent.

2) Emails that remind me a) that I have a tiny, tiny penis and I should pleasure my woman more (aside here: how did they KNOW?) b) I’m incredibly overweight and should buy this non-FDA diet drug from an Internet Pharmacy or c) Nigerian pyramid scams. Obviously incredibly urgent.

I cannot see how either of these riveting emails must be responded to post haste.

In the past couple of years, I’ve come up with some elaborate schemes to rid myself of The Daver’s irritating Work Umbilical Cord (up to and including flushing down a toilet, throwing from a train, and my personal favorite: smashing to bloody bits). I gave up shortly after I realized that no matter what I did to it, work would be damn sure to give him a nice new untainted one. In a word (or two), my ideas of destruction were utterly pointless.

I guess that having that stupid device around is a constant reminder of how much MORE important The Daver is than I am because he DOES need to check it. It also reminds me of how much I hate living in such a highly reachable age some days.

But for me, someone who gets either chatty emails or spam, someone who rarely even remembers to bring her cell phone around with her when she goes out in public, a Blackberry is the most useless waste of $200 I can think of.

Hell, I’m not even enough of a gadget person to claim that the reason I’d wanted it was to dick around with it. If I were somehow to get one, I’d probably demand beg Daver to set the whole thing up for me so that I didn’t do what I normally do with small, expensive gadgets: break them into tiny unrecognizable pieces without even trying.

I stood there in the T-Mobile store admiring all the shiny colors and teeny buttons, picking up one, then the other and for a moment, I nearly bought one. Even now, I don’t know why I really thought this was a Necessary Evil.

I put them both away, thanked the patient yet befuddled clerk and walked out of there. I figured that if I was going to spend some dough on something that I really didn’t need, I’d buy an unnecessary new iPod.

And I got back up onto my high horse and resumed my Campaign of Terror Against Blackberries once more.

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