Ahhh the BlackBerry. I have had one for years and I must confess my love is deep, abiding and strong. I really felt for Barack Obama when it looked like he’d have to give his up. I got shaky just imagining it.
But the Berry has got me in trouble at times. Saucy exchanges viewed mistakenly by other people and taken the wrong way. E-mails sent on the run to the wrong person, and ABOUT that person. Not to mention the way it starts randomly dialing people — always the most inappropriate people — without your knowledge whenever it gets jostled in your purse, and you later look down and ask: “What the FUCK?” while cursing yourself for not having deleted the contact information for that weird Colombian guy you briefly dated and quickly fled.
My berry and I have had our moments.
Nonetheless, nothing is as rip-roaringly funny as what happened to my paramour today. He fired off a PIN to me that expressed his desire, in quite hilarious terms, to do something naughty to my knockers, always his favorite body part.
But instead of sending it to me, he sent it to a prominent politician whose last name is right beneath mine in his contact list.
Oh. Dear.
I have been laughing so hard I can barely breathe for a half hour. The esteemed Mr. Trix-Smith has yet to respond to my paramour’s dirty missive.
I have always wondered if there’s a book to be written about Berry mishaps, or at least the trouble modern technology has caused people in their personal and professional lives. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t accidentally forwarded an e-mail to the wrong person, for example.
What’s your most embarrassing technological mishap?
January 31, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Sammy’s Hill, by Kristin Gore (yes, from that Gore family), has a couple of examples of this, which even fictional are great. Because of reading that, I have always been beyond careful of what I’m sending to whom.
However, I do know someone who didn’t get a job as he accidentally sent an IM to the person he was bitching about.
Always watch your tech kids.
January 31, 2009 at 6:46 pm
I am a crackberry novice, I just received mine this past December. So far there haven’t been any embarrassing mishaps, I save those beauties for real life (causing a lock down in my place of employment anyone? yeah). But as careful as I am with the phone, I am sure a mistake of momentous proportions is just around the corner. Because that’s just my luck. And six months later, after I’ve calmed down, I’ll be happy to share. Stay tuned.
January 31, 2009 at 9:51 pm
An email was sent out asking for anecdotes about volunteers; I typed up a sarcastic little bit about our nutty volunteer and accidentally sent it to the volunteer coordinator instead of my friend. It ended up being printed in the weekly bulletin, but the tone was such that it sounded sincere.
My mother once answered the phone to hear a male voice say “Sabrina, take off your dress.” She quickly realized that call was for me.
February 1, 2009 at 12:37 am
I don’t have a Blackberry. In fact, I just got rid of my rotary cell phone last year. But oh heavens, that is great. I wonder if the papers will start reporting an affair between the politician and your paramour?
The Politician’s Paramour would be a great name for a romance novel, incidentally.
February 1, 2009 at 4:31 am
I have no personal electronic foot-meets-mouth stories, but I’ve a nice one about an ex-colleague. He was a senior partner at the headhunting firm I worked for, but suddenly started to act shady. Hardly had any company-related appointments, but was always unreachable, that kind of stuff.
Suddenly he just quit and the next thing we heard was that he was starting his own headhunting firm. Because he’d been one of the original founders of our firm he didn’t have a non-competition clause in his contract (stupid, yes), so there wasn’t much the other partners could do, not unless they could prove that he had stolen information from the database.
Suddenly, I received an email from his new office manager, about the new company and how the candidates from my company should make an appointment, because there were some great opportunities coming up.
I got the email because my information had been entered into the database a few weeks before he quit. The only way he could have gotten THAT email address was if he’d pulled it out of the database, probably along with a couple thousand of others. The email was clearly not intended for me.
But the best thing was the office manager’s screw-up. She’d CC’d, rather than BCC’d the whole thing. We had all the contacts he’d stolen from the database, and my bosses plucked him like a turkey. It was fantastic.
Also, that was a very long and dull story. I apologise.
February 1, 2009 at 11:33 am
@haguenite: haha, I have one similar.
A company I used to work for was being stingy at review time and the exec’s had given us in HR the heads up that there would be no salary increases, more cost cutting, need to increase performance, blahblahblah. Well, at the same time the Director of HR had been given a pay raise (of course) which brought him to roughly $10k a month. The GM’s secretary was the official contact for sending out communications to the masses, and so she sent out the email full of corporate-speak bullshit informing everyone why they weren’t getting any extra money that year. Oh, but wait. Instead of typing this memo on a brand new Word doc, she somehow RE-USED a prior Word doc, which just happened to be the one she had sent to the HR Director informing him of his raise. (To this day I have no idea why she would re-use an electronic piece of paper, it’s not like she typed it in pencil.) So everyone got this ‘no money for you’ email, but if you happened to scroll down to the bottom, you saw, “Dear HR Director, It is our pleasure to inform you that your annual merit increase has been approved and your new annual salary will be $122,000.00 per annum. We thank you for…”
Oops?
February 1, 2009 at 11:44 am
@kadinsky: I’m having trouble believing that the secretary did that accidently…
February 1, 2009 at 12:05 pm
@cate: I know, right? Except she really was that scatterbrained and she got in a heap of trouble for it, so who knows? All I know is I had a steady stream of pissed off plant workers in my office for the next 3 weeks.
February 1, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Are you telling me you and I haven’t been engaging in an x-rated electronic relationship since New Year’s!?! Then who have I been talking to!?! And what are they doing with those photos I thought you requested!?!
February 1, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Mac: I did mean to thank you for the website you pretended you weren’t referring me to. Sweet!
February 1, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Nor did I cancel my rental subscription at Adultdvdempire.com…
February 2, 2009 at 11:41 am
Ok, I have one, though it’s not too terrible. At my former company we had our own IM system, so we could IM with every single one of our 18,000 colleagues at any time. Which of course meant that all day, every day, everyone had multiple IM windows open, chattng with friends and colleagues.
My boss at the time worked from home a lot, and we would have a steady IM stream going on each day – all work discussions, for real. One day he was driving me bananas, being so micromanagerial, that I fired off a missive to a friend of mine, saying “S is driving me insane!” (with S being the first initial of my boss)
Well imagine my surprise when my boss himself writes me back asking “Who’s S?” Apparently I opened the wrong window and had sent him the IM instead of my friend. After freezing for a second I realized I could actually talk my way out of this, because I had only used his initial. I have no idea if he bought my story or not, but at least it wasn’t too damaging.
I know people who have been fired for inappropriate use of that very IM system, incidentally. Be careful people!
February 2, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Ah, these are all brill.
My own: I worked at a fancy law firm several years ago, and one of the senior partners was having a $2000-a-plate fundraiser dinner for a political candidate. It sounded incredibly tedious in the email, and one of the other partners forwarded it to me as a “hey, wanna hit up this bash?” kind of joke. I replied that I would rather undergo Chinese fingernail torture eat my own hair than attend. Naturally, I sent this response to the fundraiser-partner instead.
Thankfully, I realized the error right away and tore hell-for-leather to a tech-savvy hackertype lawyer who recalled it for me before it was read. Thus saving my dreary job for another two months.
February 3, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Trix, did you get Highlights magazine when you were a kid? There was a little feature called “Was my face red” That’s what popped to mind when I read this.