One of the daily rags I get in my e-mail (this one from Information Week) summarized an article that centers on an upswing in “Blackberry Thumb” — basically a repetitive stress injury to the thumbs from thumb-typing on those crazy little keyboards on the Blackerry and other
PDA devices. The whole piece is here.

I still haven’t found a good reason to jump on board with the Blackberry. (Or “Crackberry” as we call ’em at the office — they seem waaaaay to addictive!) I mean, do I really need to be connected to office 24/7? The doctor tells me that I need less stress in my life, and my wife tells me I need to take a break from projects, both home and work. Given all that, having always-on access to the office would be a horrible thing for me. And I know how I am. I wouldn’t be able to just put it away, and ignore it until the next morning, and I’d be checking it every so often to see if I’d missed something. That would be my undoing!

Now, the “surf anywhere” aspect is quite appealing, but not enough to overcome the potential black hole that would be the corporate e-mail landscape. In fact, I bet even the ability to surf on-demand would be a bad thing for me. No doubt that I would find something on the web that
I needed to be checking on a very regular basis — ya know, like the price of Chinpokomon dolls on the South Solomon Islands.

So, I guess I’m saving my insurance company money by not becoming a Crackberry-addict, and by not texting messages all day long. (BTW, when did “text” become a verb?) Maybe that’ll be another factor for computing health insurance rates in the future, alongside smoking, caffeine use, having an IT job, and eating red meat. 🙂