The Curse of the Blackberry

I don?t own a Blackberry or personal digital assistant, but all my really important friends do ? or maybe they just seem important because they own one. It?s like the great chicken and egg debate and which came first, but I?m skipping ahead and will find a way more meaningful way to bring poultry into this discussion in a moment.

I have a close friend I?ll call Bob, since that is indeed his real name, whowho constantly pecks away just under the table with his little Blackberry toothpick during dinner checking important emails, stock reports, rearranging his calendar and appointments, glancing up just enough to act interested in my haiku about the eerie similarities of the debates on illegal immigration and native versus non-native landscaping.

His Blackberry has become an obsession and makes me feel like a nobody because I?m able to get through an entire twelve pounds of mashed Russet potatoes at the Red Bar without anyone emailing or calling to tell me that the meeting in Zurich has just been moved to Milan.

I?m too embarrassed to admit that the real reason I don?t own a PDA is because the only important person who ever emails me is Salamatu Doudou, the deposed Interior Minister of Nigeria, who asked for my help in transferring several million dollars in stolen Nigerian money in exchange for a cut.

The only important appointment I have to keep track of is with JoAnn, my understanding parole officer who personally agrees that there are far worse crimes than floundering in the nude - like bringing rotel dip to a dinner party for example.

So rather than admit to being such an obvious nobody, I lie and tell everyone the reason I don?t have a Blackberry is because I instead feel a strong sense of noblesse oblige to my longtime PGA or Personal Guatemalan Assistant, Manolo.

Aside from making me seem important in a retro sort of way, it also makes me come across as deeply caring since outsourcing his job to a Blackberry would make me no better than those cold hearted snakes at American Poultry Processors who replaced my great uncle Waylan with an automated giblet bagger - this after he had given them twenty two years of loyal service and several of his fingertips.

Don?t get me wrong, I?m not completely out of touch with technology. I do have a cheap cell phone with an Earth, Wind and Fire ring tone the size of one of those huge green phones with six foot antennas the soldiers in Vietnam War movies use to call in bombing strikes against Viet Cong sanctuaries along the Laotian border.

Unfortunately, every one knows that important calls are taken on phones the size of postage stamps and aren?t generally announced through a poor digital rendition of Boogie Wonderland.

So, I have come to hate the Blackberry and all the other knockoff PDA?s such as Ocean Spray?s Cranappleberry and Johnson & Johnson?s new Dingleberry with an optical colon scope instead of a digital camera.

Blackberries seem to dominate the lives of everybody who have them like spoiled children and Amway.

I also hate them because they make me realize how boring and simple my own life must be because I?m able to manage it just fine without one.