The Game of Life

Signage

A scene from my office yesterday: Partner challenges a manager and associate to a contest. Let's see who can type a message on the Blackberry the fastest! The sentence will be "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." The three of them get set and then go. After about 10 seconds or so, the partner says he's done. Manager goes over and checks the partner's message. Apparently the partner typed "jumped" instead of "jumps" and also did not put a period at the end of the sentence. In other words, did the partner really win if the sentence was not grammatically correct? The associate who was working with a Blackberry Storm was stuck at the word "The". Finally they quibbled over whether the partner's win was valid. Very funny as this all happened in the morning. Seems like an episode straight out of the TV series "The Office".

Silence! Silenzio! Ruhe!

BlackBerry Bold

At my workplace, you could go through a whole day without speaking to anyone if you really wanted to! Sometimes it's so oppressively silent in the office that you wish someone would just make some noise.

By the way, the BlackBerry Bold I ordered finally arrived today in the office. It's my first BB device ever. Now I can feel like I belong in the club of people who are chained to their devices/work 24/7. Yay! (Please note the sarcasm) This is strictly my work phone. I make personal calls on an old fashioned candy bar shaped Nokia. (Aside: Americans love flip phones, aka clam shell phones, whereas Europeans tend to favor the candy bar shaped mobile phones) I haven't discovered all the different bells and whistles the Bold has, but I can take pictures with it, surf the web, check my work and personal emails, use it as a GPS device, alarm clock, calculator, etc. The phone has a huge selection of ring tones to boot! So far I've settled on one called "Star Chime". Ha ha ha! I find it kind of funny, absurd and sad at the same time that I need to rely on ring tones to add color into my life. :-P They do say that laughter keeps you healthy and I think we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously anyhow.
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Ich erinnere mich als ich in Deutschland gearbeitet habe, dass nur Managers und hoeher BlackBerrys bestellen konnten. Ist das immer noch der Fall? BlackBerrys waren damals und bleiben immer noch Statussymbole der Geschaeftsleuten.