Enlightenment through Pizza

When I started my job as an account exec­u­tive at Hafen­brack Mar­ket­ing a few months ago, I pur­chased a Black­berry. In doing so, I hoped to keep track of my tasks, sched­ule, and emails so that I could guar­an­tee the needs of my clients were being addressed quickly and prop­erly. I have been amazed at the use­ful­ness of this tool, and I have gained an under­stand­ing of the ori­gin of the term “Crack­berry.” When my com­puter crashed a few weeks ago, I was saved by my abil­ity to stay in touch with the world through my hand­held com­puter. For the 2 days that I was with­out a lap­top I cranked out count­less emails, viewed doc­u­ments, updated con­tacts and did not miss a beat — although I did develop a wicked case of Black­berry Thumb, rem­i­nis­cent of the Nin­tendo thumb I used to get as a video game addicted youth. Fol­low­ing those 2 days, I was sold. I was con­verted into an evan­ge­list for this tool. Last night my com­mit­ment was taken to a whole new level by some­thing near and dear to (and slowly clog­ging) my heart — pizza.

Here was the scene. We were hav­ing car­pet installed in our home, and my wife and kids had been rel­e­gated to the base­ment for the day so as to steer clear of the installers. By the end of the day, the house was still upside down, the kids were stir crazy, and my wife was in no mood to make din­ner. As I was dri­ving home chat­ting with her about the events of the day she sug­gested that I just pick up some pizza for the fam­ily to munch on for din­ner. Never being one to pass up pizza, I anx­iously gave my endorse­ment to the plan. I agreed to take care of every­thing and hung up the phone. (Although I guess you don’t tech­ni­cally “hang up” a mobile phone) Sud­denly I real­ized that I did not know who to call to get this pizza. I could have called infor­ma­tion and asked for one of the chains, but that would have lim­ited my choices and cost me money. I could have called my wife and asked her to look up the num­ber of one of them, but that would have cost her time and forced her to have to choose the place — not some­thing she enjoys. Then it hit me. Use the Blackberry.

For the sake of the story, we are going to say that I pulled my car into a lot and did this because that is much safer than say­ing some­thing like I did this at a red light. From the main screen of my Black­berry, I clicked on the icon for Google Maps, which quickly opened the pro­gram. I then sim­ply typed Pizza and my zip code. Imme­di­ately, I was given links to nine pizza stores within 5 min­utes of my home. I clicked on the name of a new place that I had not tried yet, and up popped their phone num­ber with a hyper­link to dial it. I clicked the link and 10 sec­onds later I was order­ing our din­ner. Just like that. All my options, right at my fin­ger­tips, when I needed them. It was too easy. My appre­ci­a­tion for the mobile web and my Black­berry was taken to a whole new level. Pizza infor­ma­tion on demand — it truly is a great time to be alive.