The Mighty Crackberry

Blackberries don’t float.  At least mine doesn’t.  I dropped it in a bathroom sink this week and it plunged straight to the bottom.

To be fair, though, my Blackberry isn’t a fruit.  For the uninitiated (definition: anyone who actually has a life) let me introduce the Blackberry.

It resembles the offspring of a shotgun wedding between a handheld video game and DVD remote control.  It combines the functions of e-mail, web browsing and a cell phone in a package which is too big to be a convenient phone and too small to be useful for anything else.  The annoyingly small screen is nicely matched by the frustratingly small keyboard.

And I’m completely hooked on it.

No matter where I go, day or night, I can send and receive e-mail for work.  I carry my office on my hip.  I’m never away from my job.  I’ve taken (and sent) e-mails from the top of a hiking trail, waiting in line at a movie theater, sitting at the dinner table, and even during bathroom breaks.

On the street – Wall Street, mostly, where business is supreme and little else matters – they call these little beauties Crackberrys.

Which is why there were two very different reactions to my story about dropping mine in the sink.  Those of you who are normal human beings were asking, “Why were you using it in the bathroom?”

My fellow addicts were asking, “Why didn’t you hang onto it better?”

For safety’s sake, I should have left it in its case.  When I got my Blackberry, I also bought it a particularly nice leather holster.  The sort of thing you might have seen hanging from Doc Holliday’s hip.  If’n I’m in a meeting and I sense trouble brewin’, I pull back the side of my sport coat to expose the Mighty Crackberry.  Then, just to make sure my message is understood, I snap open the safety strap.

If anybody in the meeting gets out of line, I can whip out my weapon and send an e-mail faster than they can blink.  From the wide-eyed stares they all give me, I can tell they’re intimidated by my prowess as a cell-phone slinger.

They’re probably less intimidated by my spelling.

My particular model of Crackberry doesn’t have a full keyboard.  Some of my fellow addicts have larger models that sport keyboards that look like the shrunken-head version of the one you’d find on any computer.  Not me.  I opted for a Crackberry that vaguely resembles (but is still much larger than) a regular cell phone.  So I only get twenty buttons.  This means that most of the keys have more than one function.  A given key could mean ’5′ or ‘g’ or ‘h’ or ‘:’.  The Crackberry does its best to figure out what I mean based on what I’ve already typed.

Trouble is, my Crackberry isn’t very smart.  If I miss a key stroke (easy to do since the keys are approximately the size of a grain of rice) then the poor thing gets completely overwhelmed and starts spitting out gibberish.

This can reduce even Shakespeare’s glorious prose to garbage.  A couple of misplaced clicks and Hamlet’s soliloquy is rendered as:

To be or not to be…that is hygr question. Wagethee it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slunga and seepwa of outragois fortune or by taking up adma against a sea of troubles end them.

Let’s see your so-called great actors like Hopkins, Brannaugh, Ferrell and Sandler try to make sense of that speech.  (Although, I must admit, this is probably exactly how Shakespeare looks to most of my sons’ generation.)

Normal communiques don’t fare much better.  A month or so ago some colleagues and I had been invited to an upscale business lunch.  Wanting to sound smarter than I really am, I wrote back on the Crackberry and said:

We owild be deligyrd to accept your invitation.

“Gee,” one of my colleagues said when she received a copy of the message, “When you put it that way it sounds like a medical condition.”

Despite the linguistic betrayal, I still love my Crackberry.

I love it so much I accessorize it.  The leather holster was just the beginning.   For Christmas my wife gave my Crackberry a Bluetooth headset.  This is a tiny, wireless, Star Trek-like device which hangs on my ear and allows me to talk hands-free.  When I’m using it, a light on the side blinks a steady blue beat, matched by a light on the Crackberry.  Two devices, in harmony and happy – and when they’re happy, I’m happy.

If you walk through the airport, you’ll see people like me, strolling along the concourse chatting into our wireless headsets –  completely disconnected from reality, plugged into the hive-mentality of modern business; mindless robots mechanically obeying orders beamed directly into our brains.

Which is why dropping my Crackberry into a sink full of water was such a big deal.  If the Crackberry died, it would take days (and reams of paperwork) to get a new one.  I’d be off the grid.  Disconnected.  Forced to think and act on my own!

I lifted the dripping Crackberry out of the sink and stared at the screen.  All my familiar friendly icons were gone, replaced by a blank white glow.  True, electronic tabula rasa.
No one could contact me.  I couldn’t call them. They couldn’t call me.  E-mail was utterly out of the question.

Like an old zoo specimen finding his cage door unexpectedly open, I shrank back from the idea of freedom.  I couldn’t possibly deal with the nightmare world outside on my own.

A few anxious moments with the hot air hand dryer put the Crackerry right.  When I saw the familiar icons and the blinking green “mail waiting” light I breathed a sigh of relief.  I’d been plugged back in.