Today, I decided to let a friend of mine do a guest post because she is a recent BlackBerry convert (Which she is blogging about) as well as a fellow accountant. She has a great blog that she will discuss more about below. Follow her on twitter for some good laughs and an interesting take on the US state of affairs. (No she is not an out of work executive.  Yet!) Adrienne — we welcome you and thank you for the guest post. 

"I have to start all of this with the background I guess. I don’t know Themes 4 BB through a shared fixation on BlackBerry, ironically, but because of a shared accounting connection. Pretty awesome and I’m sorry it took me so long to come around from Windows Mobile, now if only I could get my boss to convert. It’s sad. Have you seen the Tilt 2 signature you can’t erase?

Anyway. Accounting. I don’t do it (thank God), I just write about it. I also get to train CPAs to pass the CPA exam which is pretty awesome but also requires I be connected at strange hours of the day. Especially the final week of November before the December blackout when everyone is trying to jam in one more exam. This year, for the first time since 2007, I experienced our ridiculously busy season on a BlackBerry.

My former Windows Mobile phone (a Motorola Q9m with a thousand scratches, dents, and 17 master resets to its name) did the job two years in a row because I was scared into believing Exchange wouldn’t play well with BlackBerry if our company didn’t have the right servers. Whatever, I’m not technical, I just believed that as temperamental as Microsoft products were, once you got them working correctly (especially together) the belief was it was dangerous to tempt fate and make a huge jump into someone else’s technology.

What a load.

In October, after that 17th reset, I decided I was due for an upgrade. I annoyed a colleague with a BlackBerry a handful of times and asked stupid questions with the Verizon window open on my desktop. "Are you sure it will work…?" "Sure?!"

I’d fallen in love with the 9630 by then. Look at me, speaking in BB code. Conversion problems? Oh please, it has been divine.

Outlook contacts sync over just fine with Desktop Manager. I get all of my email accounts right there at a flip of my thumb, no more logging in and out of different Gmail accounts through hideous Internet Explorer. All I had to do was set up Outlook Web Access through my Exchange provider, who happily walked me through half an hour of configuring it.

I even destroyed one Tour already at my company party. Don’t ask me what happened to it, just know that it dripped water all over the counter at a San Francisco Verizon when I brought it in for an autopsy the following day. Point being, for three full days, I had to trade back my slice of hyperconnected Heaven for my old Moto Q9m.

I’d forgotten so much. Like how clever it is to have the exclamation and question mark keys where they are. I kept screwing up on the Enter and delete buttons on the Q9m – when I finally got my BlackBerry back on Monday (overnight delivery to Chicago – I had to drag that horrible phone with me on vacation! I nearly cried) it was a matter of moments before I was reacquainted with the layout. It makes sense, and as a recovering Windows Mobile user, I understand exactly what it feels like to be lost with your device.

I have long skinny fingers and do A LOT of emailing during my commute, somehow I felt more cramped on the Q9m’s larger keyboard because it lacked the comfortable curve of my Tour.

It seems stupid to elaborate so much on a phone but that thing has my everything. Including panicked CPA Review students at midnight on the last Saturday before an exam window closes.

I can’t ever go back.

The irony being as I write this, BlackBerry is experiencing a massive outage across multiple networks. That blue light keeps taunting me as if there’s something there but it’s quiet on the trackball tonight and I have to accept that work might just have to wait.

I’d still never go back.

And probably needed a break from the email anyway.

It’s official. Jr Deputy Accountant is a BlackBerry convert. With the awesome colorful lights theme on my 9630."