Change In Plans

Greetings from Soho, in New York City.

Last week, my BlackBerry cell phone basically stopped working all together. First, after many months of not rolling upward, the trackball in the center refused to roll downward as well. Then the device froze entirely, and apart from the sad side-to-side motion of the trackball, none of the keys or controls worked.

Like the owner of an incontinent pet, I knew it was time to say goodbye.

With heavy heart, I walked up to the Verizon store on West 57th Street. Raoul, in the service department, told me that the BlackBerry was still under warranty, and that he would replace it immediately, free of charge. This BlackBerry had come into my life on the day that we departed for Madrid; the beginning of the second leg of our world-round trip.

That day seemed like decades ago. How could a warranty last so long?

Raoul got a shiny new BlackBerry from a box, and hooked it to the right side of a desk-top terminal. He hooked my old, beaten BlackBerry to the left side of the terminal, and hit a switch. Raoul explained that the terminal would transfer all of my data from the old device to the new one, and that it would only take a few minutes.

As I watched my friend have its brains sucked out, I thought of everything we had been through together:

• Getting wet on the dinghy of the gulet boat in Turkey
• Being damp, frozen, crushed, and thoroughly sweat upon during the Haute Route ski trip (when half of the buttons stopped working, and then miraculously healed themselves)
• Listening to Zola speak to his friend Matthew, who was all the way back in New Jersey, as I swatted mosquitoes in a dusty tent in Rajasthan
Cleaning South African sand from the keys after it fell from a beach bag in Cape Town (and Namibian sand after dropping it in the dunes near Swakopmund)
• Cracking the screen by dropping it on the tile floor of the Hotel Agave in Positano

I thought of the countless mornings when I read the New York Times on-line, and the terrible days in October and November that I watched the financial world implode through the little screen.   I thought of the dozens of blog posts that I had tapped out with my hypertrophic thumbs in Morocco, and in Turkey, and in India, and in Australia.

I thought of the night in Namibia, 300 kilometers west of the South African border, where I walked up a huge hill in the moonlight, because I suspected (correctly) that I would get reception from the top.

This all seems a little pathetic. But while we traveled, I was clinging tenuously to my feelings of relevance, and connectedness, and of my very existence outside the small bubble of my untethered family. When I was in Switzerland, away from my India and the kids for the first time in months, I clung to them through garbled phone calls at the edges of frozen cliffs, standing on tiptoe in the cold wind to get a signal.

I clung to all of those important things through my cracked, worn out, barely functional, constant-companion BlackBerry.

As I took the new device, and thanked Raoul, he packed the old one away. Maybe it will be sent to a lab, where the RIM engineers will try to figure out why it stopped working after only 10 months. If they only knew.

Goodbye, old friend.

It is nice, though, to have a trackball that rolls upward again.