The Tribe of Adminsa home for wayward admins

Your manager ordered a shiny new Blackberry to keep up with his 100-emails-an-hour habit and the calendar that you use as a pinball machine. He’s off on his first adventure and it’s not working! Nobody’s happy, especially the person who set it up…you.

First things first: he is in his own country, right? Blackberry and other PDAs use cell phone services. International connection is not assured. If you are from the US, it will not work much of anywhere but the US and parts of Canada, and you have to make sure that you have service for Canada. Maybe a bit of Mexico here and there. Other countries have more interconnectivity, but not necessarily everywhere. You need to check this out with your company or your service carrier.

I assume you went through the process of syncing the little demon with his computer and making sure it was charged. If not, go back and read the directions. Sometimes you just have to. Once all that is done and it’s still not working, let’s start with the worst possibility:

They don’t. Sometimes PDAs just don’t work. They take unscheduled holidays, sit down on the job, do their nails…think of them as 16-year-old temps. There are some things you can try to improve this situation:

Hard sync once a day. Sometimes plugging into the computer and syncing every day improves the wireless performance. It’s inexplicable. Try it anyway.

Try a different vendor. It’s more likely that you can try this if you work for a very large company. A different wireless vendor can make all the difference. Some vendors are better in some areas and others in, well, somewhere. Ask your co-workers. If you don’t have that choice, find out if there’s a trial period with the current vendor. You usually have 30 days to return the little monster if it doesn’t hold up its end of the log.

Are we in a new time zone? Did the BB fail to reset itself to the new time zone? A sure sign of trouble. Have him try turning it off and on again: remove the battery for about 30 seconds and put it back in. If that doesn’t work, have him take it out for a longer period of time and put it back. If that doesn’t work, tell him to come back to the office. No trip could be that important.

Once you’ve got your hands on it, or if all this upset has been going on in the office all along, accidentally-on-purpose wipe it: use the wrong password several times until it locks you out and wipes itself (there’s a hard reset command, but just doing it wrong is easier to remember). At this point, you can do the battery trick (just to be sure), hook it back up to the computer and resync it. You should know that older emails will not survive. You will be starting from the moment you sync. Can’t be helped. Tell the boss spilt latte and all that. He hasn’t had time to get attached to them anyway, has he?

If the problem still continues, insist that you have a lemon and get a trade-in. There are lots of lemons out there, no matter what “they” want you to believe. It’s a veritable lemonade factory. Make sure your boss gets a good one. That’s what you’re for.

We’ve been talking about this as if it’s all about email, but it’s the meetings that are really the issue, isn’t it? They come up an hour off, they don’t show up at all…it’s pretty much all the same solutions as above, with one exception. If you’ve been reading this site, you already know that you shouldn’t create or accept meetings via a Blackberry if you can help it. They get all fracacta. However, if you have tried accepting the meeting yourself in his absence and it still isn’t turning up on his Blackberry, his emails are coming in promptly, and the Blackberry is showing the correct time zone and this is still happening, have him try accepting the meetings via the BB. If that doesn’t work, pucker up and scream “Lemon!!!”

Related posts:

1. Drunken Time Zones in Outlook
2. Mangled Meeting Title?