Separation of work and play

After nearly two years of solid service my hacked, broken, old and generally worn out iPhone 2G finally gave up the ghost a few weeks ago.  It got stuck in this mode where it though the headphones were always plugged in and so it wouldn’t ring or let you talk/listen through the handset and when you did plug in headphones, nothing would come through them in either direction.  So, not much good as a phone (it still works otherwise though, so fear not, it will be re-purposed into a remote for my apple TVs throughout the house).
I was resolved to order a black berry (that’s right, I said it…err, wrote it) when I returned from Christmas break a few weeks ago.  Yes, I did ask the corporate telecommunications person if they might be so kind as to buy me a new iPhone, especially since I had gone through all the trouble to acquire my 2G phone all those years ago and then hack it to make it work with the black berry sim I had been issued.  And yes, I got the predictable response. No.
It turned out I didn’t need to order one as one of my colleagues happened to have a barely used one sitting in her desk.  So after struggling all afternoon to get it configured, I was making/taking calls and sending/receiving email from my new ‘device’.  I lasted for all of 16 hours before I was on the AT&T website ordering a refurbished iPhone 4 and adding a 4th line to our family talk plan.  The BB…is….just…awful.  Its like driving a Mercedes to work everyday and then being told tomorrow you have to ride a 86 year old blind elephant.  And this was going from a 2.5 year old iPhone to the latest and greatest that our friends from the great white north had to offer.  In the end it was an easy decision.
The unexpected side benefit is that now I have two devices: one for my work life, all connected to exchange for email, communicator for IM and the corporate directory for everyone’s name, rank and serial number.  And one that I actually look forward to using for play with facebook, twitter, amazon, paypal and a million other apps that I can’t live without.  No more will I check my gmail on the weekend and then absentmindedly look at work email and find myself responding to random requests 30 minutes later.  Work is for work and play is for play.  And so what if I have to buy all new pants or look like batman everywhere I go – the separation is worth it (well that and not having to depend on a black berry for anything really important).