Blink…blink…blink.  The red glow beckons me.  Check me, it says.  Don’t you want to know?  Don’t you want to feel how important you are, that right now, someone is trying to get in touch with you?  Maybe it’s work?  It could be important.  What if it’s a text from your girlfriend?  You should check…RIGHT NOW!!  But you’re having dinner and it’d be rude.  But you check any way.  GILT?  GROUPON?  WTH?  Why did you need to know about a sale right now?  Who the f cares?  You do right? 

Well apparently I don’t. 

For the first time in more than 5 years, I no longer have a blackberry.  I thought it would be a devastating experience.  For the better part of the last decade, I have had this tether.  It kept my organized, kept me informed, and in most cases, kept me on the shit list of every anti-cell phone at bed/dinner/meeting person around.  In a more famous incident, my blackberry was taken from me and thrown across the room, in as pure a declaration of anger and frustration as I’d ever seen.  My response was the most typical betrayal laden ill-conceived sense of anger ever propositioned.

And so for the first time in a long time, I no longer have a blackberry and I’m free.  I feel untethered.  I feel slightly more disorganized and it’s a great feeling.  I replaced my blackberry with an IPhone.

Yes, an IPhone.  How could an IPhone be any better you may wonder?  How could a device capable of so much more do so much less?  This is an experience few have endured because we all know that you don’t switch from a blackberry to an IPhone - the experience of losing the blinking red light.

The blinking red light controlled my very being and erupted my pavlovian response every time I saw it.  Without it, the IPhone has no control of me.  With no passive notification, my IPhone sits on the corner of the desk, telling me nothing and I am perfectly satisfied to know nothing.  I turn off all the sounds, the alerts, the badges.  I reject PUSH and opt for FETCH.  And without a blinking red light, I live in the bliss of not knowing until I feel like knowing. 

I sat through dinner the other night and for the first time in a long time I didn’t know where my phone was.  It was in my pocket and when I checked it at the END of dinner, GILT’s sale was still going on and GROUPON’s coupon was still for available.  I didn’t miss anything.  Goodbye Blackberry.  Sure, I’ll miss the way you handled email, BBM, the way you provided form over function but I certainly won’t miss the grip you had on me.