My New CrackBerry

Wow. They call them that for a reaon. The first day I got mine I obsessively kept checking the wireless activation to see if it had finished connecting me to a brave new world of connectedness. It’s actually a very bad thing that I have one of these, since I LOVE being connected.

I’m one of those compulsives who loves feeling connected to things. I get antsy if I don’t see the news for a few days. A day without Internet makes me anxious. I use my cell phone display to tell time instead of a watch. And now I have the ability to send and receive emails with me 24/7. Really, I shouldn’t be given this kind of power… who knows what I’ll do with it.

Actually, I didn’t know. I couldn’t make up my mind if I should read the manual, immediately try changing my ring tone to prove my uniqueness, call someone to make sure it works, have someone call ME so I can test out my new ringtone, browse the Internet from my hand, send an email to myself just to see if I get carpal tunnel on my thumbs before the end of the first line, practice whipping it out of the geeky plastic holster it came with, or do one of a hundred things I could think of with such connective power in the palm of my hands.

I couldn’t wait to go to my first meeting and surreptitiously check my email messages while someone drones on about the QuickBooks software that I’ll never use because I’m simply too busy playing with my Berry.

It’s so awful. I’m such a cliche. And the worst part is, I should have been one of the first ones to get a geeky new toy. I mean, how can I be the Director of Innovation if I didn’t even have a BlackBerry! I’m so ashamed of my BlackBerry virginity that I didn’t tell anyone it was my first time as I worked the thumb wheel back and forth getting the feel of it.

Any number of “a BlackBerry is like a woman in that…” lines just came to mind but luckily my mouth-censoring software is top notch.

Oh. Damn. Well, it’s a mouth censor, not a fingers censor. It’s supposed to stop me from saying “Wow, that shirt is really ugly,” not stop me from making an ass of myself in cyberspace (where Google is secretly caching every word I write and just waiting for that moment four years from now at my next job interview when my employer says… “Bishop eh? Let’s see what our Google overlords have on this punk.”).

In any case, I love it. And I’m never giving it back.

Last night I was reading the Nascent blog at midnight in bed by the soft backlight of my CrackBerry as Lynn slept next to me, never appreciating the fact that at that very moment, moments from sleep in my bed in Den Haag, I was two clicks away from reading the news on CNN.com and learning that a volcano had erupted in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen killing a bunch of soldiers stationed on the island.

What the hell were they doing stationed on an active volcano island in the middle of the sea?

Perhaps by staring lovingly into the shinyness of my CrackBerry the answers will be revealed.

All will be revealed. I am sure of it. Just keep the precious free from finger smudges and keep her green light blinking contentedly and all will be revealed.

The magic BlackBerry genie will materialze (broadcast on either WiFi or GPRS waves, he’s compatible with both), and I will be granted entrance into the Kingdom of Ultimate Connectedness where my body is made up completely of electrons and I become one with the universe.

Man, I’ve got to stop watching those Japan anime movies.

I wonder if you can watch anime on a BlackBerry.