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Lawyers Face Withdrawal When CrackBerry Goes Down
Last night's BlackBerry outage triggered frustration, panic and withdrawal symptoms amongst its many users, according to this Reuters article,
A Night Without 'CrackBerry': Curse or Blessing? (4/18/07). What's amusing, however, are that the comments on the outages sounded more like those of addicts forced to go cold turkey rather than professionals missing a communication device. Consider these remarks:
At the U.S. Capitol, where lawmakers and staffers rely on the BlackBerry to keep plugged into shifting legislative and political battles, the temporary outage was crippling. "I felt like my left arm had been amputated," said Joe Shoemaker, communications director for Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Dick Durbin of Illinois. White House spokesman Tony Fratto opened a morning briefing with reporby apologizing for missed e-mails. "I think we're 14 hours into no BlackBerrys. So you can imagine how things are over there," he said. Charles Ross, a criminal defense lawyer in New York, said the outage left him feeling "vulnerable and uncomfortable," and caused him to miss a breakfast appointment with a colleague.
Others, however, took advantage of the downed service as an opportunity for a free eventing. And of course, the BlackBerry outage didn't affect all lawyers, including Future Lawyer Rick Georges. It's not that Georges has disclined himself against a BlackBerry addiction; rather, he's a Treo user, who can find his fix from a bunch of different e-mail systems rather than one proprietary dealer.
Posted by Carolyn Elefant on April 18, 2007 at 06:35 PM | Permalink
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