Blackberry was Better as a Fruit

Up until a couple of months ago, I was involved in a long distance relationship that sky rocketed my phone bills. I juggled between skyping, direct calling, and texting, but that still didn’t help. During that time, the world as I knew it was about to change: *Drum roll* MTC, one of two mobile phone operators in Lebanon, was on the verge of introducing the Blackberry service to the Lebanese market. I generally tend to pick up on trends (or I like to believe that I do), but in this case I was quite reluctant. RedBerry, who was one of the first to purchase a Blackberry in Lebanon and activate its service (for a ridiculous price) urged me to do the same since my long distance boyfriend at the time, Couscous, had a blackberry of his own. “You will save a ton on phone bills and your life will never be the same again”, she said. I was intrigued.

My curiosity then took me on a journey of research and discovery; I called up a few of my friends who had also got bitten by the blackberry bug – their testimonials were as follows:

“There’s no habibi without a BB”, said the Big Friendly Giant.

“If you don’t have a blackberry, you’re just not cool – soon, EVERYONE is going to have it. MTC is cooler than Alfa. The blackberry bold is cooler than the blackberry curve. Come to chocolate tonight . . . .bla. . .”, said Insomniac.

“What is your BB Pin?” said 34 random friends.

After 4 months of deep thought, I decided it was time to buy a blackberry.

I informed Couscous - he was thrilled.

Since my phone line was operated by Alfa, I had to buy another phone number that was operated by MTC in order to activate the service (bear in mind that I had had my Alfa phone line for 10 years and had given my number out to over 600 people). Nothing would stand in my way! In less than 6 hours, I had bought a new MTC phone number, decided I didn’t like it anymore, bought yet another MTC phone number, decided I liked it, registered my new number, activated the service, and bought my very own Blackberry curve (I decided the curve was cooler than the bold). Life was great……until my next phone bill arrived and I realized that activating the service had in no way contributed to decreasing it, but at that point it was too late – I was already bitten by the blackberry bug.

Initially, the whole purpose of buying that phone was to communicate more efficiently with Cousous, but the result was as follows:

Couscous and I started talking less on the phone (once a day became once every 4 days), the frequency of our arguments increased from once every two weeks to once a day, my BB contacts rapidly increased from 6 to 86, and my table manners, conversational skills, and eye contact slowly and steadily diminished. Couscous and I eventually had an argument where he said, “I wish you never bought a blackberry.”

Eventually Alfa activated the BB service after my previous phone number was already dead and gone.

Eventually Couscous and I broke up. (Blackberry was not solely responsible for this).

Will that be a reason for me to deactivate my service? NO. I cannot be disconnected from my Facebook account, my 90 BB contacts, my MSN contacts, the World Wide Web, the news updates, and my e-mail accounts. (Xanax, please?)

I have learnt one lesson though: Being up in someone’s face all the time is just plain creepy. No matter how far we get sucked into technology and its perks, we should never forget some of the basic things it may deprive us of: privacy, physical HUMAN contact, and social interaction (to say the least).

“Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.” Voltaire