21st Century naked

On going off-line and for a walk without my blackberry

It’s been a frantic week or so here in Saskatchewan as a result of the provincial government shutting down SCN, our provincial public educational television service. I will be posting a longer piece on this shortly, but for the sake of this post, let me just say that although I retired from SCN last April, the announcement has caused me a great flurry of activity, meetings, phone calls, emails, and so forth.

By last Friday afternoon I finally “ran out of gas” and needed a time out. We are just coming to the end of another long Saskatchewan winter with cold nasty weather right up till last weekend. And then suddenly it was like someone flipped a switch and we got a week of sunny mild spring weather. I’d been sort of dancing around waiting for the nice weather to arrive when the SCN news hit, and ever since I have been running flat out, like many other people, as a part of the larger Saskatchewan production and cultural communities’ reaction.

It was very apparent to me that I needed to take a break and since it was a lovely afternoon I decided to go for a walk. As I started to get ready I noticed that I hadn’t charged my blackberry in a couple of days and it was getting close to needing to be charged. At first I thought that I’d have to remember to charge it when I got back but then I thought “Why not charge it while I’m out for my walk?”

I was planning to walk briskly for an hour or so and cover several km, so the decision to leave the device at home meant I’d be out of the loop for the last working hour of the day in Ottawa and Toronto where a lot of my message traffic was coming from. At first I felt a little guilty but then a voice in my head said “hey dummy, you’re retired – no one is paying you to be available all the time” so I set out without it. The only technology I took with me was a little digital point and shoot camera which I take everywhere.

At the end of our block is a wonderful park that has a creek running through it which is big enough that it can be broken up in a number of different ways for walking. I’d been cooped up indoors in meetings or on the phone and computer most of the week and was pretty eager to get out and enjoy the nice weather. But when I got to the park, out in the open I became very aware of my lack of connectivity. Not only could no one contact me, but I also couldn’t contact anyone, and I found this some what uncomfortable.

For much of my life I seem to have gravitated to activities which involved me spending a lot of time on my own without the benefit of instant access so I thought I was used to it. I guess that was because I’d never had the sort of connectivity I got used to at SCN so I didn’t know what I was missing. In 2001 SCN got a new CEO from Toronto (David Debono), who had the first Blackberry I’d ever seen, and who decided that I should have one too (so he could keep tabs on me I suspect). And ever since “blackie” has been my constant companion.

I had a taste of being off line a couple of years ago when I spent a month in New Zealand where my old blackberry didn’t work. I ended up buying a cheap prepaid cell phone so at least I could send and receive text messages and emergency phone calls. But now here I was in the midst of a “crisis” without my Blackberry – what was I supposed to do?

I went for my long walk, took some pictures, and discovered that the world seems to work just fine even if I didn’t have my blackberry. Thank you world.