BBM Wars

I started talking about Blackberry Messenger (BBM) in my last post and it got me thinking about that little application that keeps most BB users from jumping ship to iPhone land. I wasn't think about how BBM sucks you in and devours hours of your day nor was I thinking about the full on conversations I have on it instead of just picking up the phone and calling the person. Nope, I was thinking about how BBM has caught more people cheating, lying, and all around doing wrongery since it's inception into mobile phone history. See, the geniuses at Blackberry thought it'd be great if you could send a message to people, but not just any people, only elite Blackberry users. You could exchange pins, later to be replaced with a trusty barcode to scan, and voila! Instant messaging at your fingertips...or thumbs if we're to be technical. Then someone in the Blackberry Messenger boardroom said, "Well, Johnny, this isn't good enough! You can instant message anywhere! How will Blackberry's be different? How can we be innovative and separate ourselves from the IM pack?" I suppose he was maybe hyperventilating when he said this too. Johnny probably responded by saying, "I'm not sure, boss, but I'll solve this problem if it's the last thing I do!" His boss agreed as he'd probably fire Johnny if he didn't figure it all out. (It was all very dramatic, can't you tell?) That night Johnny did just that. He came into the boardroom the next day and said, "I know how we'll be different. We'll make it so that you can see when your message has been delivered, but even better, you can see when it's been received!" See, when a message is sent on BBM, there's a littler check mark with a teeny tiny "D" next to it, which means your message has been delivered. If someone's phone is off or they're actually on the line, it just has a check until it can be delivered. Once that person has clicked on the message, not responded, just LOOKED at it, the little "D" turns to a little "R," which means received. It also means you're f*cked if you don't answer in time because the sender can basically see that you're ignoring them.

A few weeks ago, my friend caught her boyfriend in a BBM trap. He was MIA, nowhere to be found and they were supposed to be going to the movies. It was around six or seven in the evening. By nine, she was not worried but pissed. See, she'd sent about three thousand BBM's to her boyfriend and for quite some time they all had little "D's" next to the check mark, but then a few hours after, they all turned to "R's." Only problem? He didn't respond. For another forty five minutes. Then he responded, saying he was stuck in a meeting and had left his phone back in the office. He had just retrieved the phone from his desk. Her boyfriend works in advertising and was apparently the gopher given the task of wooing some out of town clients over dinner. He told her it was last minute. He'd texted her, didn't she get the message? Conveniently, she had not. Which we all know is because he hadn't sent her one. She told him she saw that he'd received the BBM's, knew he was lying. To that, he tried to lie yet again, stating feebly that he'd never gotten the messages, he swore he left his phone behind. This is when she called me. You can only guess what I told her she should tell him to do with his R's and D's (nuts).

Thanks to Johnny and good ol' Blackberry Messenger, we don't need to snoop anymore, we can just wait until those D's turn to R's and they hang themselves by their own L-I-E-S.

That bitch stole my line,

xoxo

Blackie Collins