An idea for RIM

So it seems Research in Motion, the company that brings you CrackBlackBerry, is working to prevent another outage like was experienced last week.

I argue that these outages are good for the populace. Check out this NYTimes article — particularly this little snippet:

Barry Frey, a senior vice president at Cablevision, stepped off an airplane on Tuesday night to find that his in-flight e-mail exile had been extended.

His reaction was BlackBerry blasphemy. “I took a deep breath and finally enjoyed the feeling,” he said.

The less frenetic world he describes may not only be saner, but safer. Peter Crist, an executive recruiter in Chicago, admits to occasionally steering his car with his knees while he thumbs his BlackBerry. Tuesday night, he put both hands on the wheel and said he had a quiet, uninterrupted dinner with his wife and son — for a change.

You know — and this comes from a technophile with the same always-tethered e-mail setup — it’s a sad commentary on the state of the 24-hour workforce that this guy would steer a car with his knees and constantly check his phone at dinner with his family in the name of work.

Therefore, I propose that RIM implement BlackBerry holidays — a day where they decide to bring the system down and help the always-connected disconnect, if only for a few hours. It sounds like it was an unexpected, welcome break for more than a few folks…

  • http://www.lifelessempathy.net/ NotMyBest2Day

    Bill Maher had a good speech about cell phones and the future of the world the other night.

    The most vital thing for our existence is bees. Bees polinate our food and keep us alive. Sure, we’ve tried polination without bees and well, it doesn’t work well enough. Everybody thinks we have plenty of bees, but in fact, we don’t. They’re going away. A recent study found that bees avoid electromagnetic fields because it messes up their navigation. So when it comes down to choosing between telling your personal information out in public on your cell phone or keeping the world alive, do you really think anybody’s going to put the phone down? No, they won’t. They don’t care about anyone else but themselves.

    That’s not exactly worded, but it’s kind of paraphrased.