I am a Blackberry user and I do almost everything on it from making sure I have enough money in my bank account, to making reservations, to finding my way to places (I’m always lost), to looking at menus, to Tweeting (follow me @ColdTechComm) with the restaurant and food service community, looking for places to stay, ordering delivery and so, so much more, personally.

It was a lonely few days in Fridgeville. I am an obsessive analytics geek (some say freak) – I look at our ColdTechCommercial.com online sales and traffic numbers every couple of hours for changes, things to watch, things to add and so much more.  The Blackberry outage affected our business by driving 15% less traffic to our website (who knew people looked for commercial refrigeration from their smartphone?) and we had 25% less retweets and I retweeted less than that – there were many of my friends missing from the Twittersphere (sniff).  Less people on our Facebook, Linked-In Page and 3% less people who entered to win one of our restaurant fridges.

Some restaurant friends and some of their regulars had a lot to say about the Blackberry outage – some real and some hypothetical comments:

• Pizza delivery places could not call some customers when they couldn’t find the address or the apartment number was missing
• BBM was intermittently down so they couldn’t alert staff to come in or not come in
• Website traffic was down a bit
• Comments on Facebook and Twitter were lower
• It is possible that less people made reservations or ordered food because they couldn’t
• Some staff had to leave because their kids were at home and they couldn’t get a hold of them
• People stayed less and didn’t order dessert
• Referrals from Yelp, Groupon, OpenTable were less
• Simply, it was very frustrating

There were some great Twitter quotes yesterday about the Blackberry Outage:

@HuffPostHill: Reports are trickling in of distressed Hill staffers pretending to look busy by staring at their hands.

@HeyMyNameIsWill: I see Steve Jobs is already taking advantage of his new-found mythical abilities.

Many Tweeple:  Observing a silence to honor Steve Jobs.

@kanoxl Dear Blackberry, You remind me of my ex, Unreliable, a big disappointment & good for nothing.

My favorite is an article posted on Yahoo News  “Others are starting to get frustrated with Research In Motion and are posting, “Dear Blackberry, first of all…u should know that I’m typing this with my middle finger… Sincerely, angry customers,” “Dear Blackberry, have you tried unplugging the system from the wall, wait for 10 seconds and then plugging it back in? (I hear THAT helps)” and “Dear Blackberry, it’s nice you’re back, but can I ever fully trust you again? Also, while you were gone I touched a Samsung Galaxy in a bar.”