BlackBerry Breakdown Brings The Blues

Around 3pm yesterday afternoon, perhaps AT&T or RIM suffered an undisclosed melt-down in their nationwide wireless system leaving BlackBerry owners across the U.S. without service.

“I was in the middle of a pointless conversation with one of my faceless, empty-headed friends when my BlackBerry just died,” said Wendy Fortzgraff, a regular commuter on the R5 train in Philadelphia. “I mean, every day I spend my entire commute into and out of the city babbling senselessly into my BlackBerry and annoying everyone within earshot, and now look," she said, holding up her pink BlackBerry for all to see. "This just isn’t fair and I’m going to make sure AT&T credits me some extra minutes on my plan for the inconvenience. And they better get this problem fixed before “Bruno v. Carrie Ann” comes on tonight because I’ve got five votes in this thing for Carrie Ann,” she added, pointing to her lifeless BlackBerry and fighting back tears.

For their part, AT&T and RIM went to work on the problem immediately.

Spokesperson Brad Leverett said, “We called in our Priority Fix guys, the ones with the really nice uniforms and those blue hats that say ‘Priority’ on the front. We put them to work on the biggest computer in the building because it‘s, well, it’s the biggest and probably has the most wires in it. If we have to go all night we will, because Priority Fix means 24/7 service with only a couple of coffee breaks here and there.”

In other parts of the country hundreds of thousands of wireless customers were also left incommunicado.

Steven Phelps-Hadley of Cincinnati, Ohio was on his BlackBerry with his wife Colby when they were disconnected. “It was awful," he said. "I was doing my thirty minutes on the elliptical in the basement and talking to Colby who was upstairs watching Oprah. Next thing I knew there was just nothing. At that moment, I really wasn’t sure what to do. I could hear Colby crying upstairs. I felt helpless. I just laid down on the floor.”

In large and small cities alike, business screeched to a halt as managers couldn’t reach their sales guys and clients were set adrift without a way to reach their vendors and complain like Prima Donnas.

“I was on the phone with my boss listening to his one of his usual BS lectures and just like that the bastard was gone,” said Aaron Neetz of Seattle, Washington. “It was pretty great.”