Crackberry Detox
I’m in detox at the moment. Figuratively, anyway. You see, my crackberry died. Yup… katputzky, pushin’ up the daisies, dead dead dead.
It all started yesterday with some bizarre behavior. The little devil claimed that I didn’t have a valid SIM in it. Now I’m sometimes late paying the Rogers bill, but I didn’t think they would cut me off. A quick power cycle solved the problem and I didn’t think anything else of it.
This morning, while using it, the screen just froze. And then it started to decompose. Bits just started fading away. It was like watching a pair of jeans fade in the wash, using high speed stop motion photography. I flipped it over to perform an emergency battery-dectomy. For good measure, I pulled out the SIM. Left the whole thing in bits for five minutes (I’d read somewhere that you need to let the residual power drain out of those little capacitors and things in it…), and then put it back together. This is what I saw.
Heart in my throat, I pressed the scroller wheel to activate the reset button. So far so good, I thought. It power cycled, and then showed me the hour glass… and showed me the hour glass… and showed me the hour glass. Then the hour glass froze… and started to decompose.
Oh Boy… Power cycle again. This time I was presented with the very descriptive "Error 400", and given the option to reset, which I dutifully accepted. Next up, "Error 240". And so on.
Luckily I had my Nokia N90 with me. A quick swap of the SIM to the N90 and I had at least phone service. But no Blackberry Email. And I won’t be back in Canada until January 28th which will be the earliest I can fix the issue.
If there’s a RIM PR person out there who wants to earn some brownie points…
January 23rd, 2006 at 2:54 pm
[...] It looks like there will be a happy ending to my RIM tale of woe. This morning, my friend Jim Courtenay pinged me on Skype and asked what number I could be reached at in San Francisco. A few minutes later, the phone rang. "Hi, I’m Mike. I’m your RIM Fairy Godfather." We had a quick look at what was wrong with the Blackberry, after which he told me he would replace the unit at no charge, and have a RIM tech phone my office in Ottawa to walk somebody from our office through re-initializing the new unit on our Blackberry Exchange Server. [...]
November 1st, 2006 at 10:27 pm
[...] RIM is a company we should all stand in awe of. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you will recall that last January my berry died on the road, and RIM support air-shipped me a new one. That was awesome, but this is even better. [...]