A survey in July found that 6 in every 10 Americans with a portable email device, such as a Blackberry, check messages in bed , while 37% confess to sending emails while driving. Furthermore 4 in 10 keep their Blackberries close by while asleep, so they can feel the vibration or see the red light that announces the arrival of a new message.. Most of them admit to sitting up in bed in the dead of night and composing answers instead of sleeping or making love, the preferred activity for Epicureans.
No self-respecting Epicurean would be seen dead answering emails on a Blackberry at 3a.m. In fact , no self-respecting Epicurean has a Blackberry. Were there a Devil, this machine would be his handiwork. As it is ,a Blackberry is a clever device designed at the behest of ruthless top capitalists to enslave their staff members. The enslavement is all the more effective for being totally voluntary!
On our family holiday in Kefalonia, Greece, my son followed the minute-by-minute unfolding of the current financial crisis on his Blackberry, interrupting his idyllic days by the pool by feeling obliged to make urgent phone calls to his assistant and his boss in London, then feeling further obliged to explain to the rest of us peons what was going on. In the end he sensibly turned the machine off and we all felt more relaxed. Whether he did I am not sure. It might have been a better holiday for him had he known nothing about imploding markets altogether and lived for a few restful in blissful ignorance. Intrusive these gadgets truly are.
Good grief! People do all those things in bed with a blackberry?