Crackberries
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.
It’s so tempting, though, isn’t it? To join in with the techno-madness? I swear. I understand.
I too resisted the lure of the crackberry on my last phone purchase. I bought the simplest phone I could find – it doesn’t take pictures or surf the web or any of that…
But. This weekend while driving a couple hours with a friend I had a chance to play with her iphone. She streamed free music through it to her car system and I played games and I check all my websites and…and…and I want one. Oh, how I want one. Crackberries have nothing on this phone.
Oooooo. Blackberries. If only I could afford to drink the kool aid. I too, would have one.
But the meth habit is draining my finances… eh, what’re ya gonna do??
Love my ipod. Love my palm. . . .
Where’s that kool-aid?
My husband has a separate personal cell so that on weekends he is not carrying the blackberry around with him.
I got an iphone. It still allows email, but there are a lot of other useful functions. The calendar is incredibly helpful, and the web access proves awfully handy.
um. hello. my sister hates, hates, my PDA. she says i look like a little kid pretending a calculator is a phone. what. evar. i love it and i’d marry it if i could. call me mrs. kool-aid.
I must be the only person left in the universe that doesn’t have either an iPod or a blackberry or a Palm Pilot or a Tivo.
Good for you!
My hubby bought one for me 2 x-mas’ ago while I was building a website with a friend. A very needy friend who wanted to be able to msn chat with me at any time of day.
I used it a lot during that time, I soon learned to resent its intrusion in my life. And it is way too easy to be rude with it. Even for a polite girl like me.
I ditched it for my pink Sony walkman phone. Complete with step-counter and running software. Not quite as bad. really.
Screw Blackberry. Get an iPhone!
iphone >>>>>> crackberry
Of my many, many vices, crackberry is not one of them I’m proud to say. I’m one of those few holdouts rolling my eyes at the Kool-Aid masses, too. I have a cell phone that if you leave me a voicemail it could be days before I even see that I missed a call. What’s the point?
I am an iPod whore, so maybe I’ll get an iPhone someday, but probably not. Too much money and I’m sure way too complicated for me!
Don’t make the same mistake I did… I bought the Dingleberry. It’s a piece of shit!
(ba dum dum)
Ahhh…the crackberry. I have been tempted. On my last phone purchase I went mid-grade and opted for a SideKick. I was SO.IN.LOVE. with it for about 3 months. Now I want to take a giant hammer to it, smash it into itty bitty pieces, stomp on the pieces, and then flip the pieces off. It has about 12 gazillion ways in that one phone for people to get in touch with me. Some of them being: AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, my own email address that alerts me immeditately if I have a new email, text messaging, (Oh, new alert as I type this, I just got an email from my sister) the internet, which gives me access to my hotmail email account, and a MySpace application that alerts me immediately if I have a new message or friend request (because those are usually EXTREMELY important!) Oh…duh, of course, and the phone.
But then sometimes, when I am really bored and feeling particulary looser-ish, somewhere on one of those applications someone has tried to contact me, and then I don’t feel so bad. (And it’s super handy to have MapQuest at my disposal because I have no sense of direction!) People do think I am playing a video game when I am on it though. So I look like a dork in my Business Woman Clothes, playing a game boy. lol
I’d be willing to start a support group for Crackberry Widows….
Hello , my name is Swirl Girl, and Hubby spends more time fingering his phone than his wife.
too risque?
I’m totally a blackberry hater. EVERY man at work has one and NOT ONE SINGLE WOMAN has one…oh wait, they did just give one to a woman, but I’m still questioning her true gender role in this world.
They drive me bonkers!
I don’t own a blackberry and I’m proud of it. 🙂
I’m with Swirl Girl; you’d think the damn thing was his bionic arm.
I do like the IPhone; but, alas, I am faaaar to cheap to actually buy one.
My sister has a crackberry and she makes me crazy with it, she doesnt even know how incredibly RUDE she is with it most of the time…. somehow she has convinced herself that texting someone (in the middle of a conversation with REAL LIVE PEOPLE) is not as rude as talking to them on the phone, but you should hear the garbage I have been able to say in such conversations and she just continues to say ummhmm…. drives me batty. Seriously we have become much more attached to our electronics than we have our real live friends. I do love my IPOD, its super convenient to have 800 songs and counting all in one place easy to access no digging through a stack of CD’s…….but count me out on the crackberries and IPHONES, the times I am away from home and need a cell phone are the times I WANT to be away from email and the internet.
The best thing about the Blackberry my work issued to me for a project, was the completely unintelligible emails my co workers and I would send each other. Often in the middle of the night, much like sleep walking we would be emailing each other completely insane thoughts and ideas. I’ve saved them in a special folder of my inbox as a reminder to never again lay my dainty hands upon a blackberry.
For example:
“Thoughts for tomorrows meeting – wear pants”
“Fairy snarkle fish tree fronds” (Snarkle fish indeed!)
“I like cheese! And beer!”
“I’ve misplaced my cyanide capsule…have you seen it?”
I turned mine in the second my project was complete, congratulations on bypassing the temptation. I vote for the indigo iPod, its awfully pretty.
i don’t even have a cell phone let alone something that would give people email access to me 24/7…..if i choose to disappear for a few hours, days or *insert own timeframe here* i can and no one can find me, unless they happen to be with me 🙂 sometimes i do it just to drive DH crazy!! nothing is more satisfying then when i have a friend say “you are so hard to get a hold of” because i often wonder what is so darned important that it couldn’t wait till i was either a. home or b. at the office.
I don’t have a Blackberry. No reason to. Hell, I rarely get calls on the cheap cell phone I have, and I never, ever get or send text messages. Good Lord, I’m like someone’s grandma who can’t program the VCR!
My husband has a crackery-type phone for work, which makes him think himself far more important than he is (WHA? A tool emergency!? OMG!! Save them, Tool Man!), but if it makes him feel better and gives him the chance to send me random photos when he’s out and about (sigh…), the more power to him!
I do have an iPod, though. I love it. But I didn’t buy it. It was a gift from my husband. So…yeah…actually, I did pay for it.
I want a Blackberry-esque device, but not an actual Blackberry. It would enable me to do some of the things I do on my computer, on my phone. Thus separating me from the desk where I spend 40 hours per week at to begin with.
Okay I am backwards on this one with you, since I’ve been looking for a new reason to buy a new phone..any phone, but I especially want A BLACKBERRY..why? cause its so easy to take pictures and email out from there..did you know they are coming out with a new chip so you can even just do it right from your digital camera?
Wait, I just remembered I need a new digital camera..ugh!
LMAO @ SwirlGirl. I just have a kinda nice cell phone that I can text with, takes pics and vids, and call with. I just in the last year began texting, and I do it a whole lot.
And, I drove a minivan when I was 23, it’s not so bad. Actually, I wish I still had that fucker.
uuuuggggghhhh DGMS on the blackberry!! work wants to tether me to a desk and i am revolting with the utmost violence. however, i can’t hate on the crackberry … it doesn’t make people rude – people are just FUCKING RUDE!!
Sweetheart you are more important than Daver because you are growing a new human, and raising the two that are already here! Tell me what is more important than that? 😉
All you Blackberry Haters can #suckit while I Tweet from the bathroom and send e-mails while I walk to school.
:}
I insisted that I’d be getting a Blackberry for Christmas so that my wife could be in immediate e-mail contact with me while I was out and about with the kid in the backpack. She’s a sucker like that. Now I don’t have to talk to her; I can just e-mail her from the bathroom and ask her to bring me some toilet paper.
I don’t have a blackberry but I do have a treo. I love my treo. I don’t own a computer (husband broke the laptop..ugh), so I do my home net surfing on the treo. They’re awesome…if you give them a chance. calendar reminders, contacts (you can assign pictures, phones numbers, addresses AND emails for each), hell….even excel mobile is in my phone. What you don’t have in the phone you can always download. Freeware for smartphones is your friend.
Don’t hate it, but don’t want one either. My cell phone is enough. If somebody can’t reach me by phone, then it’ll have to wait. Hubby has a Q for work and we call it his electronic leash.
I’d take the minivan over the blackberry any day.
Then again, I’ve been recklessly talking on the phone while driving the minivan and running people down for the last three years.
I really really wanted one but just couldn’t cough up the dough for it. Instead I got a Scoop and love it. I do a fair amount of texting, don’t really have the need for the internet. I do lust after my friend’s Iphone though.
Resist the temptation, do not go toward the light!
And here I am wondering if I could get a prepaid one. lol There’s no reason for me to have a regular cell plan since I don’t talk on it much but texting on my tracfone is hell.
Here’s my .02. Last year I bought myself an iPhone. As a more-or-less SAHM, I really have no essential need for an iPhone, but I was grieving and consumer therapy is nice so leave me alone. ANYHOO: what I mostly use the email function for (and damn is this ever embarrassing to admit) is mailing notes to my home account so I don’t forget things. Then I come home, open my laptop, and there’s that reminder I just sent myself. Isn’t that awful? the only person I text is my husband, and usually it’s bullshit like “WTF aren’t u picking up. RU getting Bella or am I” and stuff like that. Sometimes my brother and I get more creative. But I live having everything (music, web — which I use all the time, phone, email, text, maps) right there in my purse. The day I got stranded in a car at the airport, I was able to look up numbers, map where I needed the tow truck to go, call people, and listen to music while I waited with my dead car.
Sometimes I wonder how I ever existed before.
In short, buy a hot pink one, put a Hello Kitty sticker on it, and never look back.
My wife has a blackberry, my children go through cell phones like paper plates and they all have been tempting me to get rid of my 4 year-old cell phone!
I’m close to moving to the darkside but I won’t get a blackberr, I’ll get an iphone instead… 😉
I don’t even have a working cell phone. We were at the verizon booth at BJ’s last weekend adding money to my son’s prepaid very nice phone that I made him buy with his own money, and he was admiring the blackberries. I said very softly to him, “you don’t need a crackberry”. The salesman looks up, all serious and says, “everyone needs a crackberry”. Um no, not the message I wanted to send to my 14 year old!
I am so not important enough to have one– and I don’t…
… I not a twitter person… but if I were… maybe a blackberry would make that easier?
I seriously hate them also — and I do receive important emails occasionally — but here’s the thing — I do NOT have to work after hours, and neither does my blackberry toting hubby — when we choose to answer crap after hours it’s our choice (sometimes we think we HAVE to, but that’s a delusion perpetrated by our techno-dependent society) — really it’s nearly everyone’s choice — we live in colorado, if it’s that damned important and we miss it, we can say “we were out of range” because if I drive 15 minutes from my house I can be at the bottom of a deep deep canyon with no coverage of any sort whatsoever, and blackberry or not, no one will be contacting me via anything more modern than shouting or smoke signals.
My techno savvy sister gave me a palm pilot one time. Everytime I pulled it out of my purse (every 3 weeks or so) the batteries were dead. That’s when I knew I was born in the wrong era. I also have a hate for cell phones though.
I’m a crack(berry) whore and not ashamed to admit it. I have no Internet access at work because the people I work for are a bunch of Big Brother Bureaucrats so the crackberry is my only link with the outside world. At least, that was my excuse to get one.
Now it has officially fused itself to my left hand like a bionic limb extension. It is always, ALWAYS on vibrate. I don’t care what kind of meeting I’m in – if that baby vibrates I AM ON IT.
Does this make me kind of an asshole? Well, sure. But truth be told, I was kind of an asshole already.
I have a Blackberry, hubby has an iphone. I am addicted. I can do anything while on the run. It makes it convenient. Hubby complains all the time that he can’t do this or that – and will take my BB to do it.
I say buy one. You will love it as much as I do. Maybe all the Blackberry haters are just jealous… I’m just sayin’
I’m still not even entirely sure of what a blackberry is. I’m sure that I will do what I have done with pretty much every other “awesome can’t-live-without” technological device and buy one just as they are going out of style. But whatever. The last thing I want is for people to get in touch with me even more easily. I do hate everyone, after all. (Except you. You know I love you.)
Don’t have one, don’t need one–I get the same kind of emails you do, except I’m impotent and always winning the lottery.
hilarious post.
The fact that I’m addicted to email is the very reason I don’t need one. Dave would admit me to a mental hospital if I had one, as he’s lucky to get a kiss hello before I check my email. If I didn’t like my email so much I’d think I had a problem.
Wait, don’t the comments from your blog get forwarded to your email. HOW CAN YOU NOT WANT TO CHECK THOSE?
No don’t do it. The husband just got one a few weeks ago and now I’m the third wheel when we go out. I swear I’ve heard him talk about that thing in his sleep. And as for that clicky wee ball thing for scrolling through emails, I’m going to to pop it out with the screwdriver if I get my hands on it long enough.
I’m addicted to email (and other internet activities, no not porn you perv 😉 ) and I know that if I got a blackberry they could put my photo in the dictionary under “crackberry”. I don’t think I could stop checking it.
Kudo’s to you for resisting the pull. We anti’s gotta stick together.
I Phone = definitely I Phone. Rare is the work environment that habnds out i-phones so at least you look like a person doing fun emails rather than a crackberry addict who can’t leave work ever. I love mine.
[…] suited for older kids. Kinda like that kid’s Blackberry I bought Alex back when I was a Blackberry Widow, which bored him to tears then, but now, finds it wildly […]