My initiation into the world of hi-tech gizmos : How to buy a Blackberry

This post is on popular demand, rather my one and only fan, Paccashaana asked me to put it up so doing it lest I lose her as well...

It all began when my trusty Nokia which also happens to be the first phone I bought myself (with my khoon pasine ki kamai, if you must know) way back in 2005 started developing an attitude. Incidently I blew up the entire full and final settlement I received at my last company (now you know what peanuts I was paid at the job and why I left it) to buy myself this phone and was mighty pleased with it. At that time the dealmaker was the fact that it was "phone with a flap" you know the cool phones which you flick open to receive and make calls, a muted brown in colour (I hate bling), compact and quite sturdy. Throw in the added advantage of FM radio and a something mega pixel camera and the salesman never had an easier sale.

I took care of this prized jewel like people take care of their kids, the only thing I didn't do was give it a bath, the rest I did. Also when in office I would keep it open in a 90 degree angle so that I could see who is calling and decide whether I wanted to take the call, so over the years my phone has been given many nicknames "Cobra", "Antenna", "Sattelite" to name a few and together we have been the butt of many jokes, but we just took in our stride. And I can say with some conviction that even five years later it still looks new, with not so much of a scratch on it (I am something of a bawa when it comes to taking care of my belongings). But as all good things must come to an end, my relationship with my phone also soured. One fine day it just completely switched off and no amount of coaxing and cajoling on my part helped. To say that I was devastated is an understatment. Thats when I decided that I need to get me a new phone and I decided that I am going to buy me phone that had the bare essential options, text message, incoming calls, outgoing calls, thats it. I decided that high end phones are not for me. Accordingly my sister and I set off to the store.

We arrived at the store and true to form I told the salesgirl what I was looking for - a mobile phone and made my self quite clear "I want a low end version, which just has calls and text". She went off to hunt for such phones and we were left to look at high end phone on display. Different varieties of Nokia, Sony, Samsung, etc. along with their vital stats were on display. We looked around for a while and in a section of the store all by itself I found the Blackberry sitting quitely giving me the eye. As if by magic I was drawn to it and found myself falling in love all over again. It was quite sleek to look at and it boasted of emails and internet. I stood looking at it and just then the salesgirl arrived with the low end phones I had asked for. When I say they were basic... they really were!!! If I had seen them first, there was a very good chance I would most definitely have bought one of them but given my sudden love-in-first-sight with the Blackberry I hesitated and the shrewd salesgirl saw it and put two and two together and launched into an superstar salesgirl mode promoting the Blackberry. It does this and it does that (everything she said bounced mile high over my head, I tend to switch off when people get over technical with me, this reminds me of the time a good friend was trying to get me interested in going to the casino, explaining how in the long run you may lose your money in the casino but in the short run given the probability and standard deviation of things you can end up making a decent sum. I only hope I was not looking as dumb I was feeling when he saying "probability and standard deviation". It there is one thing I hate more that technical jargon it is Mathematics and related fields. How I managed to get through school, college and Chartered Accountancy with this dreaded subject on the syllabus is something I will reserve for my memoirs). Fifteen minutes into the jargon blasting speech I was feeling so numb skulled that she many have said that it is toilet trained  and cleans up after itself at home and I would have believed it.

The only thing I really wanted to know was how to make calls on a Blackberry, rather whether you really could make calls or does it only receive and send emails and support business applications which make graphs, presentations, excel spreadsheets, but was too ashamed to do so. Still I asked a few questions like how many contact can I store (a training I attended saved me here, one of the faculty members asked us to invest in a Blackberry as he said you need to develop contact and store all of them, with a Blackberry you would do just fine, he said), What other colours was it available in, how many mega pixel was the camera, other buyers in the store were smirking, but I ignored them and went ahead and bought it.

We have been together for the past nine months and the only hiccup we have has so far was the text message icon disappearing when I pulled out the SIM card, other than that we are getting along just fine.