Idle Thoughts

All you need is love? Oh, for fuck’s sake.

So BlackBerry is the latest company to join the inglorious list of many who’ve purloined a Beatles song to attempt to sell their dull and mediocre wares. This isn’t even the most egregious offence: That honour belongs to George Bush and friends indulging in that same song at an APEC conference some years ago.

John Lennon must twitch in his grave every time the song he wrote is abused for such base commerical and political purposes.

One wonders how the advertising weasels managed the cognitive dissidence here. Taking a song about love, of all things, to promote a device which is the very symbol of the destruction of work-life balance, and the weapon of choice of corporate raiders the world over.

So, in honour of an corporate icon’s blatant appropriation of a prime piece of the 60’s counter-culture, I give you a list of eight examples of how a Blackberry could be used with “love”:

1. A oil trader receives a call on his BlackBerry while on her annual holiday. She spends the next 6 hours in his hotel room, organising a shipment of crude, while her family takes in the sights, without her.
2. A claims-assessor at an insurance company uses his BlackBerry to draft an letter denying an experimental cancer treatment to a dying father, because he’s under pressure from corporate to cut claim payouts.
3. A middle-aged director of a bank uses his BlackBerry to text his wife, telling her he’ll be home late from work. In reality, he’s staying back to fuck his (male) personal assistant.
4. A graduate analyst at an investment bank uses his BlackBerry to view photos of his newborn son. He hasn’t actually seen his son awake in the last 3 months, because of the inhuman hours he has to work.
5. A late-20s stock broker places his BlackBerry conspicuously on the bar, as he picks up women whose names he won’t remember tomorrow.
6. A mother-of-4 learns via text message to her BlackBerry that she’s been fired.
7. A father talks to his 8-year-old daughter on his Blackberry. He’s in India, attempting to get an out-sourced software development project back on track, and won’t be home for another 6 weeks.
8. A Systems Administrator is woken at 3am by his BlackBerry, telling him some servers have gone down. He leaves his sleeping wife, and heads into the office. He’s not paid any extra for this, it’s just expected of him.

Like the song says, there’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.