Rumspringa

Remember the old Samsonite luggage commercials where the gorillas jumped up and down on the suitcases to (I guess) test their durability? It was around the same era they would run over a Timex with a bulldozer to show its ability to keep on ticking.

I would like BlackBerry to hire me to be their Monkey. Maybe now they call it Beta Testing, I'm not sure.

All I know is I have now been through three BlackBerry Pearls in one year, and two BlackBerry Bolds in the last six months.

In all of them, the track ball has stuck. When I upgraded to the Bold, they insisted this design flaw had been remedied. I bought the Bold in April and the ball died in August so I would argue they have some work to do.

Now, in every case (so far) they have warrantied them out, without a moment's hesitation.

But they can't really...atone...for what it costs me to lose communication for days on end. Since it's my JOB.

It didn't help matters when Twitter crashed last week -- and BlackBerry was among the last clients to be restored.

This meant I had to endure yet another series of iPhone interventions.

Eventually, I realized I started to sound like an abuse victim trying to rationalize away the damages. (Everyone around me eventually became an enabler, or a confronter -- suggesting maybe I deserved it.)

Once the replacement arrived, I took it straight to the BlackBerry store (no, I don't work on my own phone anymore than I'd perform brain surgery on myself or color my own hair.)

My usual man Lucas wasn't in, but I got along just fine with Russell. He was very timid with me at first, but he soon came around to my way of "Man vs Technology" style of battle. Around the third try he couldn't get the phone to recognize my UserName, he could be heard half-cajoling, half-berating the device, "You know you want to...you know you want to..." As the little blue bar struggled to confirm across the bottom of the screen.

I am not even making that up. That is what he said.

I still think there are BlackBerry people and iPhone people. I am a word-girl. I gotta have a keyboard at my fingertips. Touch-screens are a little too Philip K. Dick-ish for me. A little too Minority Report. I nearly cried when I had to replace my dial-microwave with a flat front. My worst nightmare is a world where everything goes to touch-screen and I have to tell the car to open the pod bay doors.

That said, I'm not a Luddite.

When I let tech into my life, I just expect it to worj.

I don't want to spend my weekends banging my laundry against a rock down by the river (or as K-Cuz pointed out, we don't have a river, so I'd just be rinsing my delicates down by the sewer culvert...or the new pond in the centre of town).

I never suggested I was cut out to be Amish, and I had no desire to spend my last few evenings churning butter and darning socks.

Their furniture may be esquisite, but there's a reason the Shakers died out.

And there's a reason my pal Brooke was haunted by an image of me curled up in a fetal position, rocking back and forth, singing 'Tis a gift to be simple...' Like a kid in a horror movie.