@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social A brief tale for the younger people: One of my first jobs in IT had “pager admin” as part. A pager (one way, effectively a portable caller id box) was a status symbol of being in IT or otherwise “important” but not as important as the rare people with work cell phones. (IT had on-call cell phones that got passed around.) I was testing a neat 2 way Motorola pagers that I think were basically SMS devices. Not bad tech, really, but clunky. And the the BlackBerry hit. The BlackBerry was huge because it was ‘real’ work email and felt immediate. Users were addicted to it. Lots of distracted usage in movies or during meetings. It had a high cost, requiring a server to connect to the Exchange environment. But it was a huge deal and users loved them. Years before the iPhone made mobile web a lot more practical, the BB made mobile email practical. To quote Steve Jobs, it just worked. I didn’t get a BB until years later and, obviously, the company has seen better days. I rarely check my work email outside work now: I have it on my personal phone, but the iOS Exchange client is so miserable it’s frustrating. Email itself has gone from empowering to background noise.