One Ringy Dingy...

Excuse me while I whip this out.

From Forbes:

The End Of The BlackBerry Elite

Dan Woods

In many companies, smartphones are status symbols. Senior executives and key staff are armed with BlackBerrys or other premium smartphones to accelerate communication.

But when the "BlackBerry elite" started years ago, most companies did not allow executives to use their BlackBerrys for personal calls and e-mails as well, and this forced executives to carry two phones.

In recent years companies have extended mobile phone privileges to rank-and-file workers, but the two-phone scenario has been unappealing to most. The solution: Let workers use one phone for both company and personal business. And now that smartphones are relatively inexpensive and many workers own one, companies are encouraging employees to use their personal phones for work. One retail executive told me that most of his employees were eager to use their personal phones to stay in touch with work e-mail, and some workers could be reimbursed for their phone and texting charges.

Increasingly, companies are attempting to bring personally owned smartphones into the fold of corporate IT, which in practice usually means providing access to MS Exchange or Lotus Notes. This fits into the vision of Organic IT in which corporate IT is delivered through personal technology.
...

In a previous job, I was an early adopter. Honest. I had everything first, including an old-old, text-only Blackberry with a black-print-on-river-algae-green-screen and a thumbwheel.

It was fucking perfect; like the best knife I've ever owned, I used it all the time for everything, and it saved me endless labor. It was cheap, cost-effective and actually made my job easier.

Then one day they took the transmitters down (or so the local tel-com providers told us) and stopped supporting the poor old thing.

Nine minutes later there were suddenly new Blackberry's abroad in the land. They were sleek and shiny beasts, with full voice-and-text, a hundred apps and vivid 256-color plumage.

Cool.

This was followed almost immediately by an Organization-wide Blackberry Policy in which the job classifications of people who were now eligible to use one were Very Clearly spelled out.

Ruh-roh.

And, like that, a genuinely useful tool had become a Status Signifier. Another Senior Executive Penis Substitute, to be extravagantly whipped out in front of lesser mortals and used to decisively resolve urgent issues like "Where u at?" and "Do we get Sammin Cream Cheese or Reglr 4 the staff meeting?"

Organizations bang their heads on these stupid policies over and over again and almost always for the same reason; because eventually the toxic corporate fetish for turning every labor-saving device into another way to slant-drill into your few remaining hours of personal life and steal a little more of your precious time runs bang into people actually still have something resembling a personal life and want to keep it.