Worst of the Week: Rotten Berries

Hello!
And welcome to our Thursday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWirelessNews.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
So, the world nearly came to an end this week, though I’m sure many people didn’t even realize it. No, I’m not talking about a rogue asteroid that unbeknownst to scientists came dangerously close to the earth, only missing this big blue marble in space by inches. I’m talking about Research in Motion’s BlackBerry servers going down for about four hours on Monday.
As with most disasters the context of such events are best captured by reading headlines. Perhaps you saw the following:
“Where are my e-mails?!?”
“BlackBerry service crashes, burns, crashes again and burns again!”
“Why did my phone and only friend stop talking to me?”
“BlackBerry outage leaves North America strawberry red with rage”
“GRRRR! ARGGHHHH! Help!”
“The day the BlackBerries died”
(Two of these headlines are real. Your challenge is too find them.)
RIM, a Canadian company for those keeping score, came out a few days later with the excuse that the disruption in service occurred while they were performing much needed upgrades to their servers to ensure that they could handle the continued growth of their user base. I found this to be an interesting explanation, even more so after I ran it through an English-Canadian word/phrase converter I have developed in a small portion of my brain. (I have gained the ability to decipher “Canadian” by watching plenty of hockey through my Center Ice package at home.)
So, what really happened is that while playing their daily hockey game in their operations center, which usually comes just after they finish up their morning curling tournament, one of the slightly inebriated (every time someone scored a goal, all have to drink a Molson) RIM tech guys tripped coming off the ice and hit the massive “abort” button that in hindsight probably should not have been placed so close to the hockey bench. Oops.
(The previous statement is all in jest and is not meant to disparage our lovely neighbors to the north, who besides keeping the citizens of North Dakota and Montana company, have done a pretty good job of keeping killer polar bears from crossing the border and wreaking all kinds of polar bear havoc in the U.S. So once again, the statement was a poor attempt at humor, and please Canada, continue to keep those polar bears away from the border.)
Now, I’m not a CrackBerry addict (though I do love Crunch Berries. mmmm, Crunch Berries) so I’m probably not in any position to judge just how valuable these devices are to those that seem to rely on them to not only check their e-mails from anywhere (bathroom?), but in most cases as one’s only contact with the outside world. But I can’t imagine it was really that bad to have some peace and quiet for a couple of hours on a Monday? I also suspect that during those precious hours there were fewer car accidents or shooting accidents -hey, I have heard that many people in Washington rely on their Blackberry’s and some of those officials have been known to go hunting with friends every once in a while.
Since this was the third such disruption in recent memory, there is a good chance such an outage will occur again. We can only hope that when it does funny headlines will follow.
OK! Enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this Worst of the Week column. And now, some extras:
–So Sprint Nextel this week decided to shutter its Reston, Va., co-headquarters and move its former east coast execs to the nation’s heartland, aka Overland Park, Kan. Seems to make sense on the outside as a struggling company like Sprint Nextel would seem to be more “stable” with all of its head honchos under one roof. Of course there might have been another reason for the move as the carrier noted in its press release that “the move will improve operational performance by immersing senior leaders in the company’s operations.” This leads to the question of what were the senior leaders previously immersed in while operating out of Reston?
–So the FCC this week approved T-Mobile USA’s acquisition of SunCom Wireless. Looked to be a good deal for T-Mobile USA as it expands its native network in the Southeast and Puerto Rico, as well as a good deal for SunCom’s customers as they will become part of a nationwide operator that is known for offering the most value in the industry. Some might lose access to their unlimited local plans currently offered by SunCom, but I feel sorrier for them for the name merry-go-round they have been on for the past several years. First SunCom was an affiliate of AT&T Wireless Services, then that became Cingular, then SunCom was on its own, and now it’s part of T-Mobile USA. Aren’t mergers and acquisitions fun?
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at [email protected].