It’s pretty obvious by now why the ubiquitous BlackBerry PDA is commonly referred to as the “crackberry”:  when deprived of their BlackBerry, many owners actually exhibit the same kinds of withdrawal symptoms as drug addicts who have gone too long without a hit.  So when the North American BlackBerry network went dark this week, what happened to its millions of users?  

Users – there’s that drug addict reference again.  

Well, there was the expected panic, but along with that, there was also an eye-opening sense of relief for many.  

Some business deals went down the tubes, a lot of people missed important appointments.  Canadian MPs ran into trouble, with the Natural Resources Minister almost missing an important vote – a phone call with 6 minutes to spare saved his bacon.  

Meanwhile, a lot of others found a silver lining in the outage, getting to actually spend evening time with their families instead of having to attend to business, and being able to take the dog for a morning walk without having to answer the BlackBerry every two minutes.  

And even though the terminally addicted types whose entire lives are dependent on their PDAs were pulling their hair out for a few hours, as far as we know, nobody died.  And they’re all happily chained to their electronic masters once again.  

Now:  who’s running the show here – us, or the BlackBerries?  

Read more at eWeek. <-- The fact that eWeek is bold and in blue is a time-tested Interweb standard, indicating that it is what we like to call a "hyperlink", and clicking on the "hyperlink" will take you to the eWeek story to which the "hyperlink" points.  

Nyuk nyuk.