“Are they going to take my BlackBerry?” one "shocked and angry" Lehman Brothers employee asked at a bar this weekend. “Come on, come get it!”
Oh, the indignity of pending BlackBerry loss. One is tempted to say "go out and buy your own like the rest of us do!"
As a recently unemployed person, I'm usually sympathetic about the plight of those joining the ranks. But I remember the old melodramas where people sobbed because the evil villain was going to foreclose on the mortgage unless the beautiful daughter sacrificed her honor for the good of the family. Somehow, righteous indignation about the loss of a communications toy seems less compelling.
The reporter who witnessed the BlackBerry defiance quoted another employee: “This was the place to work four years ago when I came out of school. How could it go from THE place to work to this?”
Well, I don't know. But it has something to do with mortgages, and greed, with the interconnectedness of things, and with too much attention to BlackBerries and not enough attention to what else was going on under their own noses. At some point, employees are responsible, too.
Not as responsible as the leaders, of course.
Speaking of which, where are ours during this major financial crisis? They seem to be missing in action. Mr. Bush? Yoo hoo. There's another big storm out there. A really big one. If you have a Blackberry, you can read about it there.
