I remember it well. It was late in the evening on the Help Desk and I got a call from a freaked out Accountant who was with his family in Egypt on vacation and he had lost his Blackberry. The guy sounded like the Tasmanian Devil on the phone and was yelling at the top of his lungs. I may have got a few words in but pretty much had to let him vent for a while and it sounded like he may have even blacked out for a minute there. The sky was indeed falling for this poor sap. I can only imagine what his family had to endure during the rest of the trip.

Obviously there was really nothing I could do for him except disable the device on the Enterprise Server and wait until he returned to get a new device activated but he didnt take to well to that plan. He went on and on about the fact that his entire life was stored in that device and he had no backup of it at all. Somehow this was all my fault. I for one never have had that much faith in any sort of gadget that can be so easily misplaced or get damaged. If I were to do that I would have as many backups of the data as possible...even then Id still be paranoid. We all know that everything breaks eventually and in the case of a cell phone or a BB the chances of them being stolen or left behind is pretty high.

Anyway, the guy would not accept the fact that he was out of luck so he insisted that I call my boss and check the server backups then call him back. Just what I wanted to do at 11pm when I have a mountain of reports to churn out already. Well, I did call my boss just to cover my you know what but he agreed that there was really no point in waisting man hours to search for something that didnt exist. So I just killed some time and then called the guy back to give him the bad news. A few hours later I got a call from his boss completely annoyed that he was disturbed at home for something this trivial but had me explain everything again just so he could get a sense of what had happened. Luckily he sided with me on it.

The funny thing about Blackberries too is that we get a lot of calls from people who if they dont get emails over a 5 or 10 minute period they naturally assume that that the device is broken. Its depressing really, obviously that persons life is completely controlled by their email...just another reason why I call it the Electronic Leash. I have one myself and it wasnt long before I started turning the bloody thing off at night in order to get a little sleep. Sure I could turn off the sound notifications for messages but if youre going to do that you might as well power it off.

I did see something rather humorous today and that was an Ad for a type of massage designed to ease the muscle and joint pain in the hand associated with Blackberry use. Who knew? You know youve hit the big time when you spawn a new type of therapy designed to fix the problems your product causes. Kudos to RIM....maybe they own stocks in the massage businesses!!