I always find it amusing how when these Blackberry outages happen, suddenly every Crackberry addict’s life is shunted into a screeching halt and they transform from self-important harried wannabe-executive-types to whiny children throwing tantrums.
Case in point: This CNN story.
“I’m mad — it’s enough already,” said a frustrated Stuart Gold, who said he gets 1,000 e-mails a day as director of field marketing for Web analytics company Omniture Inc.
Gold, who worked most of Monday on a laptop while traveling, plans to ask his company to buy him a backup smart phone from a rival like Palm Inc., which makes the Treo, in case BlackBerry service goes on the blink again.
“I don’t know what happened, I don’t care what happened. They need to save their excuses for someone who cares,” Gold said.
Okay, really now… 1,000 e-mails a day? How have your thumbs not fallen off?
Yet, these same people freak when they see the outage explanations that they claim are “too confusing” and go over their heads technically:
The previous BlackBerry outages have prompted angry backlashes against RIM because of the company’s lengthy silences about what caused them and the cryptic and jargon-laden explanations that eventually emerge.
So what do these people want?! “Phones brok’um. We fix now.”? If you demand a full explanation, then you better be prepared to understand the technical aspects of how the network works. And if you don’t, then don’t read it. It’s not like knowledge of what went wrong will somehoe affect what you can do as an end user to solve the issue. If the network is down, it’s down. There is no magic button you can push or command you can issue to magically make your device run again. It’s out of your hands. Accept the temporary disconnect, or find an alternative and go about your miserable, blue-screen life. However you decide to do it, JUST COPE.
Besides, if your life relies upon a single device that will inevitably have outages from time to time, or worse, could get lost, broken or stolen, then you really need to rethink how you go about your business. If your livelihood hinges on you, and you alone, getting 1,000 or more e-mails a day, then maybe you need to look at your own communication dysfunctions before cursing the folks at Waterloo. Blackberry users should consider themselves officially on notice that the service is not a public utility, and while reasonable efforts are made at reliability, service is anything but guaranteed.
Anyway, I really don’t think I’d ever go back to a Blackberry, heh.
