Death At Arms Length

For most people, owning a Blackberry (or any other similar device) is a cool thing. The ability to make telephone calls has long become secondary to everything else these things can do. Take pictures, make video recording, play your entire record collection, surf the webby, games. You name it, and there is a good chance your Blackberry can do it. (Im personally looking forward to the time it can mix drinks).
But to a poet/writer like myself, they can be nightmares. Little slabs of beastly gadgetry, able to cause frustration and terror with the mere flicker of a light. You see I use mine to store notes and ideas for poems/stories and while it undoubtedly looks cooler than carrying a notepad around, I do worry about the thing erasing said notes. Times were hard in 1595 when Shakespeare was creating his wonderul works but at least he wasn't bothered about losing his sonnets to a technological glitch.


The Bards reaction to the Blackberry

I have at this very moment eight poems on my phone having not had a chance to write them down on 'hard copy'. Thirty minutes ago the word 'Reset' appeared on the screen and much to my horror it suddenly switched itself off before going into 'system start up' like Blackberries do when you perform a battery pull. I thought I had lost my work and for the five loooong minutes it took to come back on, I fretted like a coop of a headless chooks on amphetamine (thats good fretting for you). When these are precious lines for poems, and you think you might never see them again, I wonder if owning a Blackberry is worth it.
Fortunately nothing got deleted and my work is intact but the damage is done. The seed of doubt has nestled happily in my brain and is determined not to budge. A new notepad is on the shopping list.

** The 'death' in the title is a tad overly dramatic but it does describe the fear of losing unsaved works pretty accurately.