Vanessa Fox. Nude.

Last night, as I was driving around helplessly, looking for just one post office that would take my tax extension form and tell the IRS that I did indeed mail it in time, I turned to that one shining beacon of brightness, that ray of hope, always with me, the one I can count on to bring me through my times of confusion and darkness. My blackberry.

And it failed me. Oh sure, it had all its signal bars and its happy screen glittered in the, er, car light. But my pleas fell on deaf ears. It stared at me silently and refused to solve my post office woes. Um. Not that I think my blackberry has ears and eyes or a mouth and talks or anything. Don’t be crazy! It’s not like the blackberry is my only friend like that soccer ball in that creepy Tom Hanks movie! I don’t dress it up! Much!

The point is that all my blackberry would give me was error messages. Can’t talk to the server. Danger Will Robinson. Etc. This was a problem not only because I needed to find a few more post offices to hit up (the USPS web site helpfully noted that many post offices would be postmarking until midnight, but unhelpfully failed to mention which ones), but because I was planning to head to the gym after, and how was I going to do my email with an unresponsive server?

And more importantly, aah! I am without an internet connection! Why didn’t I bring my laptop with its glorious wireless card? What if I need the internet? Ahem. Not that I need the internet. It’s just, you know, nice to have around. Just in case.

This whole situation was, of course, a tragedy, but I did at least have my GPS navigation system and well, my regular mobile phone. Surely I had some technology that would save me. I found a post office with a helpful sign (paper! and magic marker! who knew that even existed anymore!) that told me another post office had the droids,er, postmarking, I was looking for. And indeed it did.

And I managed to spend my time at the gym with one of those old-fangled books, the kind with paper and type and pages you can flip. And then I rushed home to my precious, precious internet and checked email just because I could.

This morning, techmeme tells me that it wasn’t that my Blackberry had turned on me, it’s the whole network that’s down. My favorite headline is Backberry users helpless after outage”. We’re helpless! We can no longer communicate with the world around us! Helpless! I mock, and yet, I understand. I especially like that the company has advised those who use blackberries as “a major way of communication” make back up plans. Like maybe actual talking. Crazy, I know.

There is a lesson here for site owners. Yes, that we blackberry users are crazy and need to get out into the sun (but the sun’s glare makes the blackberry screen so hard to read), but also that we really do rely on our mobile devices and use them religiously to get information. If you don’t travel a lot, you might wonder why, but as someone who’s on a plane up to a couple of times a week, I can tell you that sometimes a blackberry is all you’ve got. (The planes I’m on are full of business travelers. If you look around before we take off, all you can see are a sea of blackberries. The other day, a flight attendant she would pry them out of our fingers so we could get the plane up in the air.) I don’t even want to think of my email backlog if I couldn’t snatch a quick few minutes here and there (on the plane, on the rental car bus, walking through the airport, driving down the road…) to get in some replies.

No, the lesson is not the crazy. The lesson is that please, please think of us crazy ones in your viewership. There are more of us than you think. At least if the planes I’m on are any indication. We want to browse your web sites but we have these funky mobile browsers and not-quite broadband speed. And we get to your sites and we are faced with slowly downloading images and no text. Or sad lonely error messages that tell us our browsers don’t support all the fancy javascript. Or the Flash. Or that the page just isn’t supported at all (status code 400? why oh why would you give me a status code 400?). Some of the saddest cases are the airline sites. What sites would mobile users likely need more than airline sites? And yet, when I load up so many of them, they tell me that my browser isn’t supported. No easy access to confirmation codes, or flight status, or last minute reservations. What has this world come to?

I’ve done a lot of speaking lately about site structure and optimization. And more and more, I say, and I honestly have the real-world experience to back it up, make sure your site loads well and is readable in mobile devices and screen readers. It won’t just help with search engine optimization. It will help me, sitting on the plane (or, um, driving in the car), just wanting to load your web site.

Think of me!

Of course, currently, I am blackberryless, one of the millions in the western hemisphere. I can only be thankful I’m not in an airport this morning to hear the pitiful screams and zombie faces of all the business travelers who just don’t know what to do. But I’m fully expecting my good friend, er, blackberry to return to me soon. If not, I guess I should start shopping around for soccer balls.