I don’t have everyone’s office extension memorized – I hardly ever call the office and I have an extension list pinned to the wall right above my office phone. Plus, if I ever have to call in to the office, we have this really handy system that lets the caller punch in the first few letters of the name of the person they are trying to reach, and it give you a list to choose from. Pretty slick. Unless you are calling from a BlackBerry! The BlackBerry, you see, does not have a standard phone keypad. Instead, the ‘numbers’ are alternate keys on a standard QWERTY keypad. So when I was trying to get hold of someone in the office today, I had no idea which numbers corresponded to the letters I needed. I seemed to remember that ’1′ has no numbers, so I could figure out in my head that keys 2-4 were ‘abc’, ‘def’, ‘ghi’ beyond that, mentally chunking the alphabet fell apart… which was unfortunate since I really needed an ‘r’! (Sounds like Wheel of Fortune – can I buy a vowel?)

Anyway, just a case where one useful piece of technology (the office directory) is made less useful by a newer technology (the BlackBerry). Or, a case where a new technology is not designed to be useful with older technology. You choose.

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