Hope you enjoy!

1.  I have attended a few lectures/conferences over the past year (that people had to pay to go to!) and observed people emailing, surfing the net, or messaging on their Blackberry instead of listening to the speaker.  Why even come?!

2.  I have had more than one person ask me a question in one of the following formats:
a. You know where, “insert place” is, right?
b. You’ve been to, “insert event or place”, right?
c. You know where, “insert street name” is, right?

Why ask me a question if you’re already assuming I know the answer?!

3. Listening to someone you just met casually drop the accomplishments of their children into a conversation is the worst.

4. Feeling down or sad, or even depressed is based on everyone’s own perspective.  There will always be someone who has it worse.  Sometimes thinking about someone else’s problems simply isn’t enough to make you feel better.  Everyone has a right to have a bad day or days, no matter what their situation.

5. I keep a “To-Do” list handy at all times.  There is nothing worse than looking at a freshly made “To-Do” list and feeling like you have to finish everything on the list ASAP.

6. There is nothing better than seeing someone you know when you are out and about if you want to see them.  On the flip side, there is nothing worse than seeing someone you know when you are out and about if you don’t want to see them.

7. There is nothing that tastes better on earth than ice cold water when you are really thirsty.  Example: after an hour of high school basketball practice with nothing to drink.

8. For all of you Rhode Islanders out there- Del’s Frozen Lemonade never tastes as good as after playing 2 hours of basketball on a ninety-degree, cloudless, sun-beating-down day.

9. There is nothing more humorous than two politicians (think the 2008 Presidential debates) each using their own set of statistics to prove why the other candidate is terrible.

10. And finally, you never know when a ping-pong player, who is also an aspiring chess master, who also loves numbers, and who also loves to gamble (mostly when the odds favor him) decides to then also become a body-builder.

I believe I first started to experience the annoyance that is the one letter email signature a few years ago when I noticed that a friend of mine was signing his emails simply with the letter “D”.  Or even worse, sometimes with the lower case version “d”.  Since then I have noticed that a large portion of the emails I get end with one letter.  I sometimes even have to double check the sent from email address to remember who sent me the email.  This of course doesn’t help when the email address has no part of the person’s name in it, ala AOL screen names!

Are people really that lazy or in that much of a rush that after getting through writing an entire email (mind you that some of these emails aren’t only one liners), they can’t simply spell out their names?  It’s actually quite mind-boggling.  Maybe it’s the result of the mighty Blackberry (I think I made my thoughts on the this matter very clear) taking over lives left and right.  I don’t know.  Whatever the reason may be, I don’t think I’ll like it!

May I propose a few simple rules for emailing:

1. You must at lease use the full version of the name that your friends call you.
2. You may use any number of nicknames, provided that whomever you are emailing is also familiar with the nickname.
3. You may only use a single letter as your signature if that is one of your nicknames (in which case, I would suggest that you become a little more creative).
4. You must otherwise refrain from using a one letter signature.

I hope that helps clarify.

“Just use your common sense.  Please.  Just uuuuuuse your coooommon sense”

A man in his late twenties or early thirties (I am terrible at the age thing) repeated this a few times into an earpiece connected to his Blackberry.  He was seated in the gate area with the rest of us, except he had decided to carry on a private conversation in public.  At some point most of us have done the same.  Thinking that we were talking softly while on our cellphones, while in reality speaking loud enough for at least one other person to hear.  BUT, most of us probably would quiet back down again upon making this realization.  Not this guy!

In fact, I don’t think he even realized that all of us were listening, let alone laughing at the same time.  For some reason it just didn’t register with him that we could and were listening to his hysterical conversation with what I presumed to be his girlfriend.

The gist of it involved Saturday night and various text messages that she had sent him, with him apparently not being able to talk because he had been at a bachelor party.  He preceded to read her texts back to her out loud, in case she had forgotten what she had written to him.  He implored her “to use your common sense” as to why he had been unable to talk on the phone at 11:30 PM the night of the bachelor party.

This conversation literally went on for at least 10 minutes.  This guy made every facial expression imaginable providing quite the show for his audience.  Eventually I decided to stop listening because I actually felt a little bad about eavesdropping on a private conversation, even though he had made it practically impossible not to listen in the first place.

A girl among the audience asked a very poignant question: “Are you kidding”?  I definitely have to agree with her here as my reaction was the same.  I simply couldn’t believe it.  I guess the lesson to be learned here is the next time you are at the gate waiting for your flight, on an earpiece connected to your Blackberry, having a private conversation/argument, don’t forget to look up and smile at your audience!

Be it late at night, or on the weekend, there is a constant pressure to check our emails, to stay tuned in, to make sure we aren’t missing anything. I have been to movies, to dinners, to coffee, and everywhere I turn, the site is a similar one. People taking away from their interactions with others to fiddle with their Blackberries. My question then is WHY? I just don’t get it. Maybe that’s because I don’t have one myself, maybe it’s because I didn’t even have a cell phone until 2004 (seriously, I’m not lying!). Whatever the reason may be, I just don’t get it.

When I am out and about, I don’t need, and in fact I don’t want to check my email, surf the Internet, or Google chat. I want to enjoy attempting to live in the moment, which is already hard enough for me to do without another added distraction. I know the counter argument is that you can still enjoy what you are doing, and that may be true. But, how about for those around us? To the people we are spending time with? Are they still able to enjoy our company, when we are busy trying to multi-task: perhaps having a conversation, while writing an email, while waiting for yet another email. What would happen if we just put our Blackberries away and simply enjoyed being free from our email and the Internet? In most cases nothing would happen! What happened a few years ago, when most of us didn’t have them…

And it’s not just in our personal lives where the Blackberry phenomenon has taken hold. Over the past few months, I was in countless meetings where most of the people in the room were busy doing something on their Blackberries. Most likely, they were writing work emails (though you never know, seems like having a Blackberry provides an easy cover to do some browsing of the Internet, some on-line shopping, some chatting with friends- can’t you just see the Seinfeld episode here? just picture the trouble George would have gotten himself into with a Blackberry during meetings). Everyone is in their own world, instead of paying attention to the actual meeting. Result: long, drawn-out meetings, where not much gets accomplished (you could argue that this happens at most meetings anyway!).

To be fair, I have also been on the positive end of a Blackberry. When it comes to providing directions or the answer to a friendly (or not so friendly) wager, they are great!

Isn’t there the possibility, though, that we might be better off without them? At least when we are with others in our free time? Or is this to be our curse- never being able to unplug from the virtual world, and forgetting what human interactions without a mini-computer in our pocket are all about?