koopkooper
Practically Family
- Messages
- 610
- Location
- Sydney Australia
S boss of mine was given one of these and was quite pleased I said to him "sounds like a ball and chain man!"
FIVE million US BlackBerry users faced 10 long, data-starved hours after technical problems hit their cherished wireless email service on Tuesday.
The blackout was gruelling to many — and revealed just how dependent so many people are on their pocket-sized electronic lifelines.
Stuart Gold was in Phoenix on a business trip when the service went down. Mr Gold, the marketing director of a software company, noticed ominous red Xs next to his outgoing emails.
"I started freaking out," he said. "I started taking it apart. Turning it off. Turning it on. I took the battery out and cleaned it on my shirt. I was running around my hotel like a freak. It's very sad. I love this thing."
At 6am on Wednesday, full of anxiety about the prospect of spending a travelling day untethered, Mr Gold made a beeline for his motionless device. At 7am, it started vibrating. "I breathed a sigh of relief," he said.
Many people thought they were suffering alone.
Lynn Moffat believed she had administered a fatal blow to her BlackBerry by dropping it. When Ms Moffat, the managing director of the New York Theatre Workshop, learned that the outage was widespread, she was relieved.
Others cycled through complex waves of emotion, including a bit of paranoia. Zach Nelson, chief executive of a software company, was entertaining his top salespeople in Barbados when emails from his other employees suddenly stopped arriving.
"I started thinking people hadn't shown up for work as a revolt for us going to the Caribbean," he said.
Research in Motion, the Canadian company that makes the BlackBerry, shed little light on what went wrong. It said the "root cause is currently under review".
But part of the problem could be its rapid growth. RIM says it has added 3 million subscribers in the past 12 months, for a total of 8 million.
BlackBerry users have had scares before. In June, technical problems twice interrupted the service, just for a few hours, and they were confined to specific wireless carriers that sell the devices.
A patent dispute also threatened to close the service more than a year ago.
Although RIM denied any patent violations, it avoided a crisis by settling for $US612.5 million.
At the time, the BlackBerry faithful could only speculate what deprivation might feel like.
Now they know. Symptoms include feelings of isolation, a strong temptation to lash out at company technology workers, and severe longing, not unlike drug withdrawal.
FIVE million US BlackBerry users faced 10 long, data-starved hours after technical problems hit their cherished wireless email service on Tuesday.
The blackout was gruelling to many — and revealed just how dependent so many people are on their pocket-sized electronic lifelines.
Stuart Gold was in Phoenix on a business trip when the service went down. Mr Gold, the marketing director of a software company, noticed ominous red Xs next to his outgoing emails.
"I started freaking out," he said. "I started taking it apart. Turning it off. Turning it on. I took the battery out and cleaned it on my shirt. I was running around my hotel like a freak. It's very sad. I love this thing."
At 6am on Wednesday, full of anxiety about the prospect of spending a travelling day untethered, Mr Gold made a beeline for his motionless device. At 7am, it started vibrating. "I breathed a sigh of relief," he said.
Many people thought they were suffering alone.
Lynn Moffat believed she had administered a fatal blow to her BlackBerry by dropping it. When Ms Moffat, the managing director of the New York Theatre Workshop, learned that the outage was widespread, she was relieved.
Others cycled through complex waves of emotion, including a bit of paranoia. Zach Nelson, chief executive of a software company, was entertaining his top salespeople in Barbados when emails from his other employees suddenly stopped arriving.
"I started thinking people hadn't shown up for work as a revolt for us going to the Caribbean," he said.
Research in Motion, the Canadian company that makes the BlackBerry, shed little light on what went wrong. It said the "root cause is currently under review".
But part of the problem could be its rapid growth. RIM says it has added 3 million subscribers in the past 12 months, for a total of 8 million.
BlackBerry users have had scares before. In June, technical problems twice interrupted the service, just for a few hours, and they were confined to specific wireless carriers that sell the devices.
A patent dispute also threatened to close the service more than a year ago.
Although RIM denied any patent violations, it avoided a crisis by settling for $US612.5 million.
At the time, the BlackBerry faithful could only speculate what deprivation might feel like.
Now they know. Symptoms include feelings of isolation, a strong temptation to lash out at company technology workers, and severe longing, not unlike drug withdrawal.
