The Daily Deal for Saturday, October 4, 2008

My sweet husband has a problem with phones. Specifically, he loses them. He's lost his Blackberry and I've been tiring of paying the monthly fee for his account on the 'friends and family' plan, without having the benefit of being able to actually CALL HIM.

Perhaps we can remedy that without having to pay the rather large cost AT&T would charge us for replacing his equipment in less than 22 months. J&R.com has the refurbished Blackberry 7100 on its Weekend Sale for only $99.99; $17 less than Amazon.com's deal and $80 less than the regular discounted price (the list price is $349.99, but we all know no one pays retail for these things). The phone is unlocked, so you can use it on any cellular plan. This Blackberry utilizes the "SureType" keypad; I haven't used it but, according to RIM, it's the best evah.

Our intrepid blogger, Tom Barlow, is stuck out in Ohio with no power. This is day four of his odyssey. He is "liveblogging" his ordeal for us from his Blackberry now that it has gone on long enough to qualify as an ordeal. What would you do without power? Would your livelihood suffer?

Here's what Tom has to say:

September 18, 8:30 pm
In a power outage, you quickly become a slave to the food in your refrigerator. Your goal- don't let perishables spoil, keep frozen foods frozen. You don't even see it as food; it's you money there, turning brown and fuzzy.

First, you pursue bags of ice, the vague rumors of ice, like. Wall Street chasing a bailout.

I was late to the game when our power went out, and by the time I joined the chase there was nothing left except empty ice cases and clerks still in shock from the onslaught.

Iceless, my wife and I daringly continued to dine from our increasingly gamey fridge for a couple of days, passing candidate food back and forth to share olfactory opinions.

My boss has approved the purchase of Blackberry phones for the entire group. We all need to be accessible anywhere; and late at night as our remote team bounces through its family and social life, emails fly back and forth. There's a big uptick after kids are put to bed, and another blast right around midnight right before team members head to sleep themselves. We're always on, and the dark circles under some of our eyes attest to the strain. Is this healthy?

Probably not, and more and more people are starting to protest their boss' strongly-worded requests that we be available after our workday is over. (Not our team. We love our work! Really! You're reading this, Brad, aren't you?) It's especially testy in jobs managed by unions, whose purpose it is (after all) to look out for their members' best interest. This month ABC News and its writers have been in a big kerfuffle over answering email after hours; the Writers Guild of America, which represents the writers, has been demanding that employees receive time-and-a-half for using their Blackberries.

The WGA spokesman quoted in a New York Times article said that a few minutes of looking at emails wasn't the issue -- it's more about writing material and coordinating guests, and the like, insisting that, "people are entitled to time off the job. BlackBerrys can be liberating ... But they can also shackle people to their jobs."

ABC responded by taking Blackberries away from three of its employees (real mature, guys, take your ball and go home, won't you?), and the two parties came to a resolution June 24th (it wasn't detailed). But there are big issues at play here.

If you are in a position where you have to say, "I even annoy myself," you must really have a problem. That's what Milwaukee attorney Reince Priebus recently said in an interview with the Business Journal.

I love my gadgets too, but for many users of the Blackberry (often affectionately called a Crackberry) it is creating too many distractions at work and at play. It used to be that your clients called your office during regular business hours. You dealt with business issues then. Now clients, bosses, and co-workers have access to you practically 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And it's annoying.

Even more annoying? Someone whipping out their Blackberry while you're talking to them or in a meeting with them. Banging away on the mini-keyboard with their thumbs while you're trying to have a conversation is not exactly polite. It seems like we're going to need to teach people some manners when it comes to the Blackberry. Really... is any message so important that it can't wait another 15 minutes until we're done? The Business Journal's survey of 600 readers found that 48% think there should be a Blackberry ban for all business meetings.

The Daily Deal for Sunday, April 27, 2008

I went into work Friday and set my lunch box down next to an advertisement that caught my eye right away. It claimed that you can turn used cell phones into real money. After researching the offer a little bit, I've determined that it sure looks legitimate to me. Pace Butler Corporation claims it will buy your used cell phones for cold hard cash.

The company website is clear and simple. The process works in four easy steps. Just gather the cell phones that you want to sell, print out a prepaid postage shipping label, box the phones up and ship them, then get a check. The company states that your check will be issued within four business days.

Many of the phones on their payment list will only garner you a few dollars, and some only pay .50 cents. However, there are models which will get you as much as $50. You can check out their payment values on this list (PDF file). Just a few of the higher paying models are Motorola's Q9m and Q9h, each paying $50. If you have a Nextel i580, that model pays $30. The LG CU515 and CU575 each get you $35. There's a whole range of the Blackberry 8000 series which will net you anywhere from $10 to $50 apiece.

Nowhere on the website did I see mention of cell phone condition as a requirement for payment but I assume that they want the phones to be all in one piece. They also offer assistance with cell phone collection drives and will help you with cell phone collection fund raisers. If you just want to find out where to send your dead cell phones to keep them out of the landfill, they have a link to help with shipping 3 or more phones for recycling.

I think Pace Butler is really in step with responsible consumerism and assuming that it's completely legitimate, I believe this whole concept is an extremely timely idea.

Now that gas is, for all intents and purposes, at $4 a gallon, we can begin the exercise of looking for the cheapest gas in town. Because hey, the difference between a $50 fill-up and a $55 fill-up is significant when we're all counting our pennies.

You can do this the old-fashioned way -- drive around until you note which gas stations have a line down the street, (and take your place at the end of it). Or you can do it the high-tech way and plug this URL at GasBuddy.com into your Blackberry.

Enter your city, state and zip code, and it comes up with a simple text list of the gas stations in your neighborhood, from cheapest to most expensive.

Maybe you can do this as you're waiting at the end of the long gas line this week, in preparation for your next fill-up. Far be it from me to suggest you take your eyes off the road while getting this information.

This is going to be a serious life-skill going forward. With that in mind, here are five more ways to easily find cheap gas. (courtesy of LifeClever)

Research in Motion's service to the addictive BlackBerrys (known to some as CrackBerrys) had a significant interruption yesterday for at least 3 hours. Its 12 million users were irate, tapping madly at those pint-sized keyboards, trying to will their machines into action.

But they had no luck for a while. The good news? RIM said that no voicemails and no emails were lost. The bad news? It's the second major outage in less than a year. And it's clear just how addictive these devices are.

One guy says he gets 1,000 emails a day and he was really upset. 1,000 emails a day? He's got serious issues, and they go way beyond a BlackBerry outage.

Here are a few suggestions the next time your BlackBerry is out of commission. Go talk to a coworker without tapping madly on your device with your thumbs. Read a good book. Go for a walk. Interact with your staff. Do all those things we used to do before tiny machines became our lifelines.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.