Out of 26 Letters in the Alphabet, How Did 2 of Them Get So Important?

I’ve had a mistress for the last 10 years.  She’s gotten progressively sexier over the time we’ve known each other.  She does more for me now than when we met.  She used to be a bit boxy, and she definitely weighed me down, but now, she’s beautiful and sleek.  Who is this divine creature?  My blackberry, of course.  (Where did you think I was going with this?)

Not sexy Jessica Rabbit, silly, my mistress is my blackberry

We visited my Dad over the weekend, and the subject turned to new mobile devices.  He’s just about ready to trade in his flip phone (yep, somebody still has a flip phone) for a smartphone.  The question of course centred around whether he should get an iPhone, a Blackberry, or an Android phone.  I think you know where I came out on this subject.

No, Dad, there's no send key.

As I was valiantly trying to make the case for my friends in Waterloo, I found myself wondering what exactly it is about the blackberry that keeps me so addicted.  I can get email on any device, and I can text on any device.  Both Android and iPhone arguably have better apps, and a case could be made that both of those devices are sexier and more cutting edge.  So why am I still carrying a torch for my, well, Torch?

I love it...there, I said it.

I keep saying that it’s all about the keyboard.  There is no way that I could manage my email on a virtual keyboard.  That, even I think, is a fairly lame excuse.  First, many Android devices have keyboards.  Second, I think that when it comes to the virtual keyboard, it’s all about getting used to it.  I have a virtual keyboard on my torch, but I never use it, because I don’t have to.  I have a virtual keyboard on my iPad (inherited from my lovely wife when she upgraded), and frankly, I really don’t like it, but I use it, and I manage to spell most of the words right.

Virtual keyboards.  Argh.

So if I can get past that big excuse, what exactly am I left with?  The blackberry is not widely regarded as the best telephone (it’s improved for sure over the years, but I still drop a lot of calls), and who actually makes lots of calls anymore anyway?   It’s no longer even considered cutting edge.  In fact, people look at you like you’re a bit of a fuddy-duddy (that’s right, I said it) when you whip it out in crowd.  So why do I do it?

Say it ain't so...blackberries out of vogue? 

You want to know the answer?  It’s BBM.  Blackberry messaging.  I get that it’s just like texting.  But it’s not.  Not one little bit.  First, nobody pays by the message for BBMS.  I can BBM to my heart’s content and all I’m using is data…and not very much of that.  I can text beyond the limited number of characters allowed in SMS texting without the system breaking up my messages.  I can send a voice message, a video message, a picture message, and I can set up a group.  I can even scan you to add you to my list.

BBM...I love you Mike and Jim

But that’s still not it.  I text with my daughters and lots of other non blackberrians and I live.  I still have not forgiven my lovely wife for trading her blackberry in for an iPhone (traitor), but somehow we’ve managed to stay together.  One by one my friends are abandoning their blackberries for other devices, and I manage to stay in contact.  But the reality is that I just don’t like it.  Jim and Mike got me hooked on BBM, and now I can’t give it up.  This weekend I finally figured out what it is, as I was teaching my dad to text on his flip phone (yikes).  It’s about two letters.  D and R.

If you’re a true blackberrian you know what I’m talking about when I talk about D and R.  If you’re not, you have no idea what I’m saying, but trust me, my friends, you have no idea what you’re missing.  When you send somebody a BBM, and it hits their device, a little ‘D’ pops up beside the message on your phone.  It’s ‘D’elivered.  You know that your message is no longer bouncing around cyberspace, and it’s ready on their blackberry for them to read.  They now have a flashing red light announcing your message.

Notice the magic R and D

Once they pick up their device and read your message, that little ‘D’ turns to ‘R’…’R’ead, or ‘R’eceived.  At that point, I know that the person I’ve BBM’d has received and read my message.  Now I get to wait for the response.  I’m sure it all comes down to my inner control freak nature.  When I send a BBM, I know when it’s arrived, and I know when it’s been read.  When I send a text, who knows?  I could be bouncing from satellite to satellite for hours and I’m sitting around waiting on a response.  So yes…I know if I’ve BBM’d you and you’re ignoring me.  If you’ve read it, I know it.  That’s what makes me love my blackberry, and it’s what makes me not want to give it up.  It’s the knowledge that my BBM has been read.

Is that my text message up there?

 

So in the big picture, it’s really three things that keep me in love with my sleek and sexy mistress.  First it’s the keyboard.   I know it’s not a great reason, but it’s a good one.  It’s as much about what I’m used to as anything else, and I’m just not that into change.  Especially when I like something.  

Please, Please, Please don't make me give it up

Second, it’s that soothing flashing red light.  I’ve written about its impact on me before, and it hasn’t changed.  There’s something special about that red light.  Once,  I downloaded an app that allowed me to change the colour of the flashing red light for different people, or different programs.  I thought it would be cool, but really it just stressed me out.  I missed the red light, and within a day, the app was deleted.  I know that other people are driven crazy by the incessant flashing of the red light, but not me.  It calms me.

The right light...a stronger pull than the bat signal

 And finally, it’s those BBMs.  I love that application, and I don’t want to lose it.  I love its functionality, its ease of use, and most of all I love that I can tell who’s read my messages and who’s ignoring me.   When I text, I feel like a fish out of water.  When I BBM, it’s home sweet home.

Please Thorsten (he’s the new dude at the helm of RIM)…whatever happens to the company, make sure that the BBMs and the flashing red lights never go away.  Take my keyboard if you have to, but at least leave me the D and the R.

Thorsten Heins...the dude to whom they've entrusted the future of my flashing red light.  Don't screw it up, Thor.  Can I call you Thor?

You've Got Mail

I get about a hundred emails a day.  By some people’s standards, that’s nothing.  For some others, that’s more than they get in a year.  There have been times in my working life when I’ve received over 200 each day, so by all accounts, the hundred or so (give or take) that I get now are decidedly manageable.  I am infinitely thankful that I have a blackberry with a keyboard, because as the lady in the blackberry commercial says, I can’t imagine doing all those emails on a touch screen.

Since email became a common tool at work, I’ve received somewhere between 500 and 1000 emails each week, so I feel moderately qualified to comment on the quality of emails, and the seeming lack of care that some people exhibit when they hit send in the midst of a communicative frenzy.  

Sometimes my blackberry just can't handle the communication frenzy

I am continually amazed and delighted when an email has a beginning, middle, and end.  Even in a short email, would it kill people to greet you, identify their concern or ask their question, and finally, thank you or at least close the email.   If I see one more email that simply says ‘Please send me the reports’, or ‘See me about the whatever’ there is a good chance that I’m going to crack.  When was the last time you called someone and just said, “send me the reports” and hung up.  No hello, no good bye, no please, no thank you?  If you did that, people would think you were an ignorant bastard.   Email was supposed to make things more efficient, but it wasn’t supposed to make us rude.  

Do we really need a reminder?

I’m not sure I always, always, do it, but I do try to start my emails with a hello.  I try to throw in an appropriately placed please and thank you, and I most often end with something resembling a sign-off.  Not a Hill Street Blues kind of sign off, “Now go out there and do it them before they do it to you…”, but something like Thanks, or Regards, or even my more common, S.

  

"Go do it to them before they do it to us."  A good sign off.  Not necessarily appropriate for an email, but he knew how to close.

Many people have taken to saying ‘Cheers’.  If I’m truthful, I’m not sure how I feel about ‘cheers’.  That is unless I have a glass of red wine in my hand.  Waiters have been saying it for years, and every time someone ends an email with it, I think of a waiter at the Keg.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s so much better than nothing, but I just couldn’t pull it off.  I think it takes a special kind of person to get away with ‘cheers’.

Cheers.  Click here to see some favourite lines from Norm

In addition to giving people the right to be rude and short, email also seems to have given people the idea that spelling and grammar are optional.  I have this argument with my darling middle daughter all the time, and I always come out on the side that spelling actually counts.  I was talking to her in the car today, and again, right or wrong, I informed her that I really do make judgments based on spelling and grammar.  Maybe I should have been a teacher.

'Nuf Said.  Right?

Some people have now taken to adding a tag-line to their emails that reads something like, “Pardon the spelling, I sent this from my iPhone.”  Basically that’s like saying that, “Even though I’m using really expensive technology, I’m so busy with other things, that hitting the right keys, or using spell check just isn’t an option, so deal with it.”  I know that every major email program (especially the two most common corporate platforms) have spell checkers that can automatically check for spelling mistakes when you hit send.  I also know that you can set it up to automatically occur.  (Every time I write about spelling and grammar I’m convinced that I’m going to get busted with errors, so bust-away.)  Both my wife and a close friend have this ongoing battle with autocorrect.  It results in some pretty funny emails and texts.  You know you can shut that off, right?

Come on...jsut sya yse.  Err, Just Say Yes.  Use that spell checker.

With the prolific use of texting, both in personal and corporate life, what exactly is the appropriate use of texting short-forms and text icons?  I can’t tell you many times I’ve started a work email with How r u?  As I proof-read it before I hit send (another lost art), I kick myself and fix it right away.  I just can’t bring myself to send it.  Sup?  That’s another one.  I get the appeal…it’s quick, and it’s familiar.   I have been known to throw in the odd smiley here and there.  :o)

Is it now OK to use an emoticon in a business email or text? 

My guess is that the Generation Z people who will enter the workforce will turn the place on its head, and effectively introduce a completely new language to the old-fogeys like me who still actually have a dictionary in their office.  I’m not sure why I have it, I haven’t actually consulted it for about 10 years, but there’s something about it that makes me feel, um, superior?  I hope it’s not that.  I’m positive my daughters don’t even know what the dictionary is for.  Between auto-correct, and spell check (when they choose to use it), they see absolutely no use for it.

Come on, Dad, speling isn't impotent.

Email, smart-devices, and wi-fi have turned us into a society that expects instantaneous responses.  I’m possibly the worst person I know when it comes to responding immediately, and expecting immediate responses.  I work very hard to convince the people in my work-life that I just because I send emails and respond to messages at all hours of the day and night that I don’t have that expectation of them, but again if I got shot up with truth serum, or hooked up to a lie-detector, it would probably become clear that if I send somebody a message that requires a response, that I’m looking for that response until I get it.  (If we work together, please don’t think that this means you need to start responding on weekends and in the evening…this is my problem, not yours.)

Tick Tock...why haven't you responded to me yet?

Speaking of speedy responses, how many times have you banged out a response and hit send, just to realize that you’ve made an awful mistake and copied somebody on an email that they absolutely shouldn’t see?  I have on at least one unfortunate occasion said something fairly untoward about someone (not rude, just direct) and didn’t realize that they were copied on that email.  Imagine the uncomfortableness of our next face-to-face encounter.   To his credit, he had both a sense of humour and a forgiving nature.

Ooops...talk about embarrassed.

I am sure that the pace of business and its efficiency has improved with the introduction of email and the devices we use to support it.  What I’m not sure of is whether it’s actually made us better.  I’m convinced that we hide behind it (I know I’ve been guilty of it) when we have to say something unpleasant or uncomfortable.  I know we use it instead of getting out of our chairs, or imagine, dialing the phone (guilty again).  Most of all, I know we use it to cover our asses.  Why else would they have invented the BCC (blind carbon copy).   It’s funny that we still use the term carbon copy, since a) I’m not sure you can still buy carbon paper for making copies, and b) that nobody under the age of 40 probably even knows what a carbon copy is.

OK kids, this is carbon paper...press hard, you're making three copies

It’s my personal mission to try to talk instead of type when I can.  It’s my goal to haul my ass up out of my chair and walk to the next office, or down the hall when it makes sense to do it.  The sad part is that when I do it, most often the people I’m calling or visiting ask me to send them an email to confirm what we’ve spoken about.  

Cheers, 

S.

Here's Your Sign...

I’m a connoisseur…a connoisseur of stupidity.  I kinda love it.  I love to see how silly things can get, and I enjoy it most when it plays itself out on signs.  Sometimes it’s just a spelling error, and I wonder why they just didn’t use spell check, but other times it's so much more, and that makes me laugh all the harder.  When I see stupid signs, my mind always goes to ‘Why?”  Why do they feel like they need that sign…if they’re warning against something, have they had a bad experience previously where they got sued or something?  “Let’s put up a sign so we never get sued again.”  That’ll work.

Really?  You need a sign for that?   I wonder what would happen if it said GO.

I was in a mall recently, and I walked past those shopping carts for rent.   They’re the ones where you insert a dollar or two, and borrow the cart to walk around the mall for the day do you don’t have to haul your bags on your back like a sherpa.  An excellent idea.  I don’t know what drew my attention to the basket on the back where you can stash your treasures, but when I looked at it, I was delighted.  A sign.  A notice.  A real warning:  Do Not Put Child In Bag.   I’ve decided that this is why we have cameras on our cell phones.  So we can capture all this brilliance.

Got it?  No kids in bags.

So what must have happened to this supplier of buggies that would cause them to emblazon this warning all over their carts?  Did some non-thinking father (cuz a mother would never do that kind of thing) stash his crying kid in the bag?  Worse, once he stashed the kid there, did he forget the child, and next renter of the buggie found somebody else’s kid in the bag when they went to put their own child there?  Wow.

One loser puts his kid in a bag and it ruins it for all of us.

I have been known to take a picture of a sign while driving.  I know that breaks a whole bunch of laws and rules and whatever, but sometimes you just need to take a picture.  One I wish I took, but didn’t, was in the US south a couple of years ago.  It was a horrible sign, put up by the Tea Party, or some radical group (I hope).  It was right around the time that President Obama’s health care bill was going through the congress.  We were heading down to Florida, and we were in the Carolinas or Georgia or somewhere south, and along the side of the interstate was a sign, with huge letters that said KILL OBAMA, and in tiny little letters, in a colour that blended in with the background of the sign, the word ‘care’.  The sign really read KILL OBAMACARE, but at 70 miles an hour, you got their real point.

It's almost as bad as Sarah Palin's advertisement with the gun sights, except one of those congresswomen wound up getting shot

Another less horrible sign that I took a picture of while driving was painted on the side of a truck.  I have to wonder how the driver feels every single day when he (or she) gets into a truck that says Canada’s Favourite Wiener.    I guess sometimes the people that paint these things on the trucks don’t stand back and look.

Please.  Let me drive the wiener truck today.

If you’re not from Alberta, you may have never heard of the Wild Rose Party…they are to Alberta what the Tea Party is to the United States.  More or less.  Their leader is a feisty chick called Danielle Smith.  As with all political leaders during an election campaign, she had her face plastered all over the side of a bus.  What nobody noticed until it was way, way too late, was that her face was plastered right above the rear wheels.  When you look at the bus, the wheels are in the exact position where her northern-most lady parts  (the boobs) should be.   You would have thought that it would have been somebody’s job to approve the proof before they bussed it up.

Seriously?  Nobody noticed this before they wrapped the bus

One of my favourite signs is very clearly done on purpose.  It’s the name of a store in Myrtle Beach.  It’s called the Stupid Factory.  And here’s their sign.

Finally...a store for me.

And in another shout out to South Carolina, we were down on holidays a few years ago and came across a bizarre sign at, of all places, KFC.  I guess it’s wrong to assume that all franchises carry the same product, or perhaps this franchise has a cowboy owner or manager.   I had no idea that livers and gizzards are something that people would ever think to eat at KFC, but apparently they’re a fairly popular menu item.  A delicacy even.

Imagine how fast I slammed on the brakes...Gotta get me some of that...

A year and a half later, Laura and I shot down to Myrtle Beach for a week alone.  We were out for a drive, and we drove by a KFC.  Not only did the sign say that they had Livers and Gizzards, but that they were BACK!!!  Who knew Livers and Gizzards were like the illusive McRib at McDonalds…it’s only available for a limited time, so get ‘em while we got ‘em.  Who knew?

Who knew they left?  And where did they go?

Earlier this year we were in Ohio for a weekend of shopping.  One of the kids’ fave places to eat is IHOP.  Yep, the International House of Pancakes.  Now they have red velvet pancakes with cream cheese frosting on the top, which is Haley’s favourite, so it’s a must stop.  Whilst in Ohio, we rolled into the IHOP, parked the car, and as we were going in, I noticed a sign…it seemed as common as one of those No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service signs that you often see, except this one was No Guns.  At the IHOP.  Who’s packing at the IHOP, and how do you keep a gun stuck in the waistband of your sweatpants anyway?

Please...leave your handgun in your pickup truck

Driving home from work the other day, I came up to a stop light, and I was looking around, and my eyes came to rest on some kind of trailer box sitting in the parking lot of a warehouse company.  Stenciled across the box was a sign that said “Do Not Hump”.  I’m not sure whether that was some kind of public service announcement, or if it’s some kind of technical term used in shipping.  But it made me smile, and it also made me drive around the block a few times so that I could hit the red light again and take a picture while I was waiting.  I briefly thought about parking and jumping out to snap the shot, but I thought that would look a little silly.

So is that No Humping here, or no humping anywhere?

There’s a comedian I enjoy watching called Bill Engvall.  You may have seen him on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour with Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy and Ron White.  I think those guys are a blast.  They speak to me.  Where Jeff Foxworthy has his famous bit, “You know you’re a redneck when…”, Bill Engvall’s signature bit is called “Here’s your sign…”  Every time I see a sign that makes me laugh, or that makes me want to take a picture while I’m driving, I think of Bill Engvall.  Here’s your sign…

Click here to see Bill in action