GUEST COMMENT: A crocodile ate my Blackberry
There is no novelty in having a Blackberry. There is even less novelty in having a Blackberry on holiday when you're trying desperately to disassociate your identity from the person you have become in the office.
Unfortunately, merely leaving your Blackberry at home accidentally is unacceptable. If you pull this on your boss you will look at best forgetful and at worse incompetent. If you want to dispense with your little blinking friend for the duration of your holiday, you will need to come up with something a little better. Nothing less than total Blackberry annihilation will suffice.
Taxi accidents are a favourite. At the start of a lads' skiing trip my friend called his boss to impart the unfortunate news that his Blackberry had slipped out of his hands and been obliterated by a ComCab the previous night. In the fortunate absence of an immediate replacement, he was reachable only on a landline between 8am and 9am and 7pm and 8pm.
Daring perhaps (especially in the current job market) when your bonus and ranking depend upon prostration before the cause of 24/7 deal-making, but as long as you can catch up fast as soon as you get back to work, total disassociation from your VP is possible.
Not only that, but it forces your colleagues to focus their minds. 99% of the queries that they want you to resolve are resolvable themselves. The file they desperately need to locate is right there on the drives. The formatting issue they want you to fix is easily resolvable with a right-click and a bit of common sense.
Clearly, there is a risk that you will return to find that all the little jobs you once did for your bosses are things they've now learnt to do for themselves. Your value-add will have disappeared with all the flourish of a wooden umbrella in a beach-side cocktail.
This has happened to me once, but happily my team liked me enough to figure out that I could do more interesting work. It was the start of better things.
Who'd have thought that chucking your little track-wheeled friend under a Hackney Carriage could have had such good consequences?
The author is an ex-M&A banker. A crocodile once ate his Blackberry.
