I have a cell phone that belongs to me, and it’s my primary personal phone. I’m also on call at my job on alternate weeks, and have to carry a blackberry during those weeks. The blackberry is owned by my employer. On those weeks I wear the the cell phone on my right hip, and the blackberry on my left hip.
What with all this hardware on my belt, my wife says I look like a cowboy, but I think she really means a gunfighter. Most cowboys don’t carry guns and have probably never shot anybody in anger, or threateningly growled, “Draw!”. In this, I think she fell victim to the trap that has claimed so many of us, namely the incorrect notion that “big hat” always means “bovine pastoralist.”. We’ve recently seen this in reference to the film Brokeback Mountain, which is said to be about gay cowboys, when it was really about gay ovine pastoralists.
I don’t want to be a cowboy.
So, is there a kind of blackberry I could get for myself that would allow me to have the work blackberry forward all its messages and calls to it? So that way I would never have to carry more than one piece of hardware on my belt? If so, how expensive is the forwarding on a per-message basis? This is an important consideration, because during a typical week the work blackberry probably receives at least 100 text messages; in addition to things that I actually have to act on, it gets cc’d on numerous messages just for our information. Actual phone calls to the blackberry are considerably rarer.
Can anyone give me an idea of whether this thing exists? I don’t want to walk into the Verizon store without some background knowledge. And, needless to say, this would have to be something I could get through Verizon, because that’s my current cell carrier and I don’t want to break my contract.