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BlackBerry Goes Dark

I was traveling half the week and decided to leave my laptop at home. My only form of communication was a BlackBerry.

I was in meetings most of the time, and wasn't glued to CNN on the tube or Drudge Report on screen, keeping me out of the news loop.

That's why I was so surprised to learn that RIM experienced massive BlackBerry outages on Monday -- which spilled over into Tuesday and beyond.

I was lucky. I got all my e-mail. Millions of others weren't. While some enjoyed being untethered, that should really be a personal choice and not thrust upon you by a RIM network hardware failure.

I'm of two minds here. My first reaction is anger that RIM let this happen and took so long to fix it. Then I wonder if we don't expect too much. I went for years without portable communications. I even typed out my college thesis and retyped the whole darn thing to make corrections. Cut and paste back then was literally me cutting and pasting an 80-page document back together then cranking it all back out on a manual Remington.

I'm no UniBomber, but sometimes I think that maybe I don't need all this technology after all. Maybe it is a convenience, not a necessity.

Which side are you on? Share at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on 10/14/2011 at 1:18 PM


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