Kicking the crackberry habit

My fingers are twitching. My sinews are vibrating like high-tensile piano wires. My ears are on high alert for the little 'ping!' that announces an email has arrived on my blackberry.

This is the first thing I've really noticed about being Unemployed. (A minor digression: I think I should come up with a new term, too - I don't really like the connotations of that word, especially when what I'm experiencing is actually so marvellous. How about Creatively Employed instead - what do you think?).

Where was I? Oh yes, waiting for the ping. Except - there are no pings anymore. In fact, there is no blackberry at all.

This is a major adjustment to make.

I've been intravenously connected to the interweb and email for oh, about the past 15 years or so. I remember the days before email, that's how old I am - at my first job, in the ABC, I had to log on to something called a "dumb" terminal and it was called that because it basically could only do word processing and wasn't connected to any kind of higher power, and it had a black screen and green writing and couldn't send email because email didn't really exist back then. It was sad.

When email - and the internet - were introduced about a year later at the corporation, I was instantly hooked - and I've been hooked ever since. I live for the internets. I love email. I adore being able to chat to people in practically real time. I love the written word you see, and email makes it so accessible.

Now don't get me wrong, I love letters too, and the ancient art of letter writing (and its even rarer discipline, thank you notes) is something I think Australia Post should be creating a major marketing campaign around. There's nothing quite like receiving a letter, and let's be honest, when you're going through your mail and it's all bills and junk, it's the handwritten envelope that catches your attention, and you always open that one first, don't you? Yes you do, and so do I.

But I digress. I'm longing for email. It's 955am and I've checked my gmail account about a hundred times in the past hour, just in case someone has sent me something that I absolutely must read. And of course they haven't, because most of my email correspondence is work-related, and of course I have no work anymore! So I don't know quite what I'm expecting when I hit that refresh button, and the only thing I can justify it with is that it's the force of habit.

I'm sure that in time, I'll get to enjoy the long hours without constant interruptions and orders and requests from colleagues over email. I'm sure I'll relax and revel in the opportunity to start writing real letters again.

But right now, my fingers are itching for my blackberry.