My wife – The Luddite – has been bugging me politely asking me to get her a new wireless phone for weeks – something about crappy reception and a battery that refuses to recharge.

So it didn’t come as a surprise that somehow her phone accidently fell into a tub full of water and beer during a party over the weekend. Another surprise: if you let a wireless phone sit for several hours in a cold bucket of water, it no longer works!

What to do, what to do? Go to Rogers where they’ll charge you an arm and a leg for a fancy-dancy new phone that does everything ‘cept open cans? Buy something on eBay, which will take weeks to arrive, and provide The Luddite with more opportunities to bug me sweetly ask me when her new phone is arriving?

Then, a wave of inspiration: there’s an old, but perfectly good, Blackberry in my office that’s been collecting dust. We pop out the SIM card from her the phone that has sadly drowned, and put it in the Blackberry. Problem solved, everyone’s happy.

Except now I may have just created a monster/Blackberry fanatic. The Luddite has already figured out the scroll wheel, pruned the address book, done some SMS-ing, and wondering whether it’s possible to get e-mail messages on her Blackberry.

I feel like a crack dealer who sells cheap stuff to new clients based on the idea they’ll become regular customers. And you know how this Blackberry story is going to end, right? Pretty soon, the e-mail gets activated so The Luddite can get important, work-related e-mails, which then leads to the need to get personal e-mail. Then, The Luddite will need a bigger data plan after realizing you can surf the Web. Then…..

Curse you, Blackberry!

Update: Here’s hoping that I haven’t also created a technology addict. According to a new report, techno addiction “can become so bad that people wake up several times a night to check their e-mails and text messages”.

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