I have been driven insane by the current technical problems experienced by RIM for Blackberry. Tuesday night is my TV night. I watch a whole schedule of programmes, and tweet my reactions as we go along. This week I watched Gok’s Clothes Roadshow on Channel 4, followed by a new series of Vampire Diaries on ITV 2, followed by Mary, Queen of Frocks (on Channel 4 +1), and finally, the latest series of True Blood on Channel 4 real time.
Usually during the adverts (or commercial breaks) I grab my Blackberry and get tweet happy. I usually update my Facebook status while I’m at it. Sometimes I tweet and post every half hour or so. But this week my phone was not playing. I would pick it up in the vain hope that the magic Blackberry fairies had fixed it, only to be disappointed. I wanted to surf eBay and I couldn’t. Facebook and Twitter were stuck 12 hours behind. I was fed up of reading the same posts. My emails were coming through on a 5 or 6-hour delay. Shock! Horror!
It comes to something when I spend my days thinking in hash-tags. I do something, visit somewhere, see something, and feel a desperate need to broadcast it to the world. “Just had #breakfast nice and early for once.” “My #baby clapped her hands!” “Now arriving at the #shops.” These are some hypothetical nonsensical tweets I may have posted, had my Blackberry actually been working during the last 3 days. Of course, I do have a tendency to forget my inspirational tweets, or get distracted by chores, baby or dog. It’s probably just as well.
Two years ago I barely knew what Twitter was. Now it is the first thing I see in the morning, and the last thing I check at night. I check, and tweet at regular intervals: while feeding my baby, walking the dog, even whilst walking from room to room and up and down the stairs at home. My hand feels naked without the Blackberry glued to it. I am starting to worry about my sanity.
And today, once again, I have no Twitter. No Facebook. No apps at all. My Blackberry has remained silent for most of the day, tucked into my pocket so I could check it frequently, just in case the problem had been fixed. While I was out with a friend it randomly came to life, bleeping a serious of quick alerts to inform me that my emails were arriving. They were only about 10 hours behind schedule. I think we can safely say I missed the web chats that I was interested in joining to network my recent novel and experiences as a writer.
How shocking, a mobile phone that only actions telephone calls and text messages. What has the world come to? No Twitter, no Facebook, no eBay, no emails. Since I was away from home I couldn’t even fire up our home computer or jump on the laptop. However did we manage in the good old days before social networks went mobile?
