Slap leather, sidewinder

For a short time yesterday I became part of the holstered set. I have been issued a Blackberry at my work, and tried out the nifty clip on holster. Not wanting to look like yet another guy with Batman utility belt fantasies, I have heretofore resisted hanging anything from my belt, and have generally resisted using the word "heretofore," but hey, things change. (Future iconic image of the earlier 2000s: guy with two or three gadgets clipped on his belt and a headset permanently plugged into his ear. That look will be like dresses with big shoulder pads or parachute pants when we look back on it some day. Oh, how we will laugh. By that time we will all have something the size of a button that does everything with voice command, or some gizmo surgically implanted in our brains that just knows what we want and need and produces it. Like, I could use an order of chili cheese fries right now, and I would like that to just appear before me, but the technology isn't ready yet. Sure hope I live long enough. I reallt like chili cheese fries.) The BB is a little large for the pocket, so I took the leap and latched on the holster. It lasted a full 2 hours or so, and then I broke the holster getting out of the car. Apparently I use that part of my hip pretty aggressively to leverage this sad old meat sack out of my overly low-slung and suspiciously mid-life-crisis-indicating wheels.

So I see it as a sign - don't wear the fricking holster. Down deep in my soul I knew it was wrong in the first place. Now, since the Blackberry is part of me, I am torn between just shoving it in my pocket or starting a new trend of wearing it on a lanyard around my neck. People just don't wear lanyards like they used to.

But the larger point here - I now have the Blackberry and the Blackberry has me. Like the vampire bitten, I am now doomed to slowly degrade to a semi-human form, a devolution noted by the shuffling gait with the hands held low, an almost prayerful aspect with the head bowed to receive instructions from the unblinking eye of the All Powerful One. I am resolved to a fate where I can no longer give even partial attention to the actual humans in the room with me once the buzzing and the beeping begins. I must slavishly attend to the screen. I will wantonly disengage from a crucial meeting at just the most important moment, wasting the time of everyone else in the room, while I focus on a random message from a stranger. This is my fate.

Hey, who cares about civility anyway? Human interaction? Old school. Pointless. Better to just fling pixels on the wall and see what sticks. Scattershot messaging, quantity over quality - that's the ticket. I will Twitter you later. Pull my chain and I will respond. At least until I am overwhelmed with messages, and then I will ignore them all.