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If you’re like us, it’s pretty hard to get through your day without cellphones, AIM, BlackBerrys and Bloomberg terminals. Whether it’s a message to say, “Hey, story in the Times about bestiality at Bear,” a quick buzz to see if anyone wants to come to get confrontational with the security guards at 85 Broad, have cyber sex or insider trade, without these forms of electronic communication, we’d all be at loss for what to do with ourselves (though that’s an idea). Unsurprisingly, the N.Y.S.E. and NASD, full of non-stop hate, are trying to strip us of our rights to do any of the aforementioned, in an effort to police (state) how written information is spread via internal and external exchanges.

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Last night we had dinner in the West Village with a partner at a law firm, his wife and four young women. After a few too many blood orange margaritas a debate broke out among the women about exactly when a French-fluent Midwestern girl named Sandra had moved to France for her Paris office. Someone said September. Someone else said October. We ordered another Michelada.
So the did the usual thing we do when we have unresolved questions: we blackberried for an answer. It was still a bit early for Sandra to be awake in Paris but only just. We were confident we’d get an answer over after dinner drinks.
Cut to an hour and half later. We’ve been joined by a couple of more friends. One Merrill guy who spends an unlikely amount of time rock-climbing. Another guy who works somewhere that no-one ever remembers. The bartender serves a fourth round of cocktails. We take the top off ours, then the bottom. Time seems to be moving very quickly but somehow none of our songs have come on the jukebox.
“That’s strange,” the blonde who is trying to grow her hair out after years of wearing it in a severe short chop. “My emails aren’t sending.”
No-one had received any emails for the past couple of hours. Someone wondered if the bar had some sort of blackberry interference device operating. But that wasn’t it.
It was only this morning we learned that blackberry maker Research In Motion’s entire network in the Western hemisphere had gone down. We woke up this morning with our cell phone ringing with the news. Our cell phone never rings in the morning.
“If a banker sends a blackberry and no-one reads it does he really exist,” the caller said.
This is going to be an interesting morning.
Let us know your Blackberry Blackout stories in the comments section below. Or send them to tips@dealbreaker.com Is yours working? When did it go down? What sort of chaos was caused by the sudden cut-off in instant, everywhere emails?
9:01 Update:Some readers are reporting that their messages are coming through. Others still are waiting. It seems the backlog of messages may be jamming the pipes that make the blackberry magic work.
9:21 Update:DealBook reports that some banks have service while others still have problems. “BlackBerry owners at J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup said they were getting service as usual; a worker at Deutsche Bank reported problems accessing e-mail via BlackBerry,” DealBook says.
9:41 Update:The latest twist is that outgoing messages seem to be going, well, out but the incoming messages are still backed-up for a lot of service providers.
10:00 Update: Best reader comment: “Right in the middle of earnings season blackberry shuts down. Greatest disclosure of product risk ever.”
[The picture above is of DealBreaker's landlord Pearl nervously chewing her blackberry, waiting for the network to return.]

We’re not in the business of watching the Today show so thank goodness somebody at Gawker is. Otherwise we might have missed this segment of Forbes managing editor Dennis Kneale breaking down into tears after being deprived of his email, cell phone, laptop and blackberry for 40 hours.
It’s entertaining stuff but we’ve got to admit that we’re just about at the end of our patience with this entire genre of anti-blackberry, anti-cell phone journalism. Sure its annoying when someone sends emails or texts while you’re trying to have a conversation with them, or chats away on a cell phone while you need some peace and quiet. We applaud saloons, restaurants and private clubs that have banned using the devices indoors. (By the way, the New York Athletic Club and the Ear Inn seem to have struck the perfect balance by leaving in their old phone booths, with the phones stripped out, and restricting cell phone and blackberry use to the booths). But this is all going a bit too far now.
Mobile phones and blackberries are very useful devices. When one the DealBreaker staff was recently “mowed down” by a hit-and-run driver on the lower east side, an ambulance arrived in amazingly short order, thanks in part to the fact that someone on the scene summoned them with a mobile phone. When that same staffer was confined to the hospital for several days, we gained new appreciation of the benefits of mobile communication.
We’ve found blackberries and mobile phones useful in far more mundane ways as well. Back when we worked on deals that sometimes involved long periods of waiting around doing nothing at all while we waited for some documentation to be produced or new financial models to get worked out, we made it a habit of skipping out to a movie. We’d sit comfortably in a theater with stadium seating, having set our voicemail to forward to our cell phone and our knowing we’d get our emails instantly on our blackberries. It often meant walking out of a movie once our services were needed but it was far more pleasant than shuffling papers in a conference room. And, we later discovered, our constant practice of removing ourselves from deal rooms in such situations created the impression that we were very busy, and thus very important people.
But the benefits of mobile communications might go even further, as Steve Sailer has recently pointed out.

What device that spread throughout society in the 1990s made it radically easier for witnesses to report street crimes to the cops while they were happening, thus discouraging young people from making a career of being a street criminal?
Right: the cell phone.

All this blackberry and cell phone hating is starting to look like yet another reformist campaign against a practical and useful innovation. And, of course, it’s being done in the name of our own physical and psychological health. We’ve had enough of that, thank you.

Dept. of How Stupid of Me Not to Have Thought of That Before [iSteve.com]