It’s just too fantastic. Living manifestations of the absurdity that is the American (and British) legal systems. Here we have the sordid bastard child of technology and modern sociology, sacrificed to the gods of hand-held communications systems, wrapped in a lovely tort law ribbon. I’ve written about Blackberries before, that hot superiority injection they shoot into your bloodstream in social situations (I must be important! Look at me doing incredibly important things with my incredibly important contraption!) not to mention the soothing liquid mirage of control (I am on top of everything in my life! I am ruler of my destiny! It says so on this two-inch plastic screen!). In the white- collar world, Blackberries have created a virtual faceoff, an instant barometer of your rung on the achievement ladder. Don’t have a Blackberry? Then how much of a necessity could you possibly be to the world? Get thee back to rowing an oar, oh reeking commoner. Amazing how a 3X5-inch hunk of plastic can create a new social order.

And then there’s the fabulous justifications we invent for why “having a Blackberry is an absolute necessity in the modern business arena.” Oh yes, naturally, since we need to take all that inconsequential busywork and pointless e-mail shuffling we usually reserve for the actual workday and transfer it to “off hours,” thereby permitting the pointlessness to leak freely into our actual lives. And then, as our species is wont to do, we inevitably use this “life changing” invention to accomplish one single cumulative end: fuck up everything in our path and then blame someone else. Panic attacks in grocery stores, near-fatal car wrecks, napalmed marriages, babies bathed in furniture polish – only human beings could find such marvelous ways to destroy harmony and introduce discord, and then turn around and point fingers at the most absurd thing possible. It wasn’t my inability to handle intimacy and my obsession with control that wrecked my marriage and caused my nervous breakdown – No! It was the PC-style 33-key QWERTY keyboard and customized navigation trackwheel! The easy-to-use menu interface with Dual-band network support! They made me do it! There we have it, a flawless argument – now all we need is someone trained in framing such inconceivable bullshit into streamlined, logic-tinged arguments backed up by semi-convincing legal precedent. And, lucky for us, our predecessors invented institutions called law schools that are right now churning out thousands of “legal professionals” who make a living off just such idiocy. Sue away!