That BlackBerry vibrating in your pants may be telling you to slow down

by Tony Wilson

Tragedy struck me recently. Having just retired my First Generation iPod and substituted it for a thinner, cooler iPod with 20 more Gigabytes of space and the capability to play Video, it fell from my lap getting out of the car at my son’s hockey game. In the 90 seconds it took me to realize it was gone, it had been run over by a smiling woman in a Volkswagen who had no idea of the havoc she had created to my display screen, my contact list, and my pride. When I explained this disaster to a few other lawyers, all they could say was: “Too bad it couldn’t have been your BlackBerry.”

If iPods are the coolest thing to hit the century (or in my case, the pavement), why is it that BlackBerrys seem to incite more than their fair share of contempt?

Now, as we all know, the fastest thing in the universe is legal gossip, (which is on its own special bandwidth, allowing us the privilege of knowing who’s moved firms or gone stark raving mad within milliseconds of the event). But the second fastest thing in the universe has to be that vibrating e-mail that just arrived in your pants. Amazingly, the e-mail could have been sent by anyone in the world, but there it lands, vibrating wildly in a place where it probably shouldn’t, just longing to be answered.

Most BlackBerry owners are enslaved to their crackberries, and have a drug like compulsion to respond to their e-mails immediately, whether they’ve received it in a meeting, in the bathroom, walking across a busy street, travelling in elevators, watching their kid’s hockey games, or during funerals. I know this to be true from personal experience, (except for the funerals bit). Oddly enough, the response can’t come by e-mail when you get back to the office. It can’t come by phone. It arrived in your pants at the speed of light and by God it must be responded to just as fast. This is apparently to let everyone know you are chained to a client’s file and available at any time of the day or night to service his or her legal needs.

On the one hand, it’s all remarkable technology that connects our lives and makes us accessible, competitive and efficient in a 24/7 world just like the TV commercials promise us. And I have to admit, a BlackBerry is extremely convenient, allowing me to get through most of my perfunctory morning e-mails on the Skytrain during the commute to work.

On the other hand, the 24/7 accessibility that it invites is total madness, compelling us to be available at all hours and forcing us to respond with “the definitive answer” in the bathroom, walking down the street or from our kids hockey games. Not only does 24/7 accessibility prevent us from turning the office off for a while, it eliminates the time necessary for judgment, reflection and complicated answers. “Your e-mail requires a very detailed response of eight pages” I can imagine someone typing, “but as I am on my BlackBerry, I can only give it to you in three lines as my thumb hurts.”

If the speed of an e-mail is the second fastest thing on the planet (remember, legal gossip is the fastest), perhaps the third fastest must be the speed of bad advice. One day, perhaps the Lawyers Insurance Fund may whimsically consider an added premium for BlackBerry users who the Laws of Probability say are more likely to give the wrong answer immediately while walking down the street, rather than the right one if they’d waited till they got back to the office.

Vancouver Franchise Lawyer Tony Wilson practices at Boughton Law Corporation in Vancouver, and has written for the Globe and Mail, Macleans Magazine and Canadian Lawyer. twilson@boughton.ca | www.boughton.ca/people/lawyers/tony_wilson

This article was published in the June 2006 issue of BarTalk. © 2006 The Canadian Bar Association. All rights reserved.