Many years ago, four score et cetera, I was the lucky recipient of a BlackBerry pager at Comdex.
In theory, this was a revolutionary device that would let me get my e-mail anywhere in the world. And that in itself was revolutionary. “E-mail without a computer? Absurd, good sir!”
So anyway, “anywhere” didn’t mean South Lyon, as the bricklike pager never seemed to work there. And even if it had, I wouldn’t have cared, because it needed to be charged every eight hours and the service was going to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $70.
I sent them back their pager.
Six years later, I’ve somehow managed to become Mr. Support Guy for the BlackBerry phones at work. I didn’t want the job, and I certainly didn’t want to carry one around, but alas, such is life.
I hate to say it, but this is actually a fairly decent phone. I don’t understand the allure of BlackBerry software at all, but it is very real. My past ten phones, maybe more, have been able to send and receive e-mail, but there’s something about this that makes me actually pay attention to my messages and reply to them. Crazy.
I can’t fathom paying out of pocket for one of these dumb things, but they’re much nicer than the crapass Nextel bricks that Edcor had me carrying around.
