Crackberry addicts go cold turkey

Hardened Crackberry addicts in the US were forced to go cold turkey last night following an outage at Research in Motion’s network data center in Canada. 

The sudden blackout left users from Wall Street to Capitol Hill reeling.  "I felt like my left arm had been amputated," Joe Shoemaker, communications director for Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Dick Durbin of Illinois told reporters. 

Others took it as a rare opportunity to unwind. William Hickey, co-head of investment banking at Sandler O'Neill & Partners in New York told Reuters: "I was trying to conduct business with my BlackBerry last evening, but once I realised it didn't work I could sit down and enjoy the Rangers game and the Mets .”  

Maybe RIM could fix for a once-a-week outage while it upgrades its servers. Think of it as a public service, to help wean users off their dependency and restore some sense of work/life perspective.

It might also leave time for a little philosophical discourse on the bigger issues in life. Take this question from Wall Street blog Dealbreaker as a starting point for discussion: "If a banker sends a BlackBerry and no-one reads it, does he really exist?"