If you haven’t heard of Ask Annie; it’s a neat column about money issues at CNN. Often she answers work related questions. How it obviously works is you ask Annie and she hopefully answers.

I like Ask Annie because she comes up with some clever situations (or her readers do). Like her recent Friends on CrackBerry? post. One, I wish I wrote great titles like that all the time; if I had no scruples I’d outright snatch it.

Two; good dilemma. I can’t even stand when co-workers or friends ignore me for a cell phone and BlackBerry use can be even worse and at times has pushed me to the brink of insanity. Oddly, what Annie did was ask Miss Manners (you know Judith Martin the etiquette expert) for her thoughts on the matter.

I rarely agree with Miss Manners because she appears to hate small children and I'm rather fond of small children. I didn’t think her advice for office workers who are sick of Blackberry was so great either.

Annie writes that Miss Manners said, “Of course it's very rude to be doing business during a social outing… but you should have nothing but sympathy for people who have no time off. It's very sad to have no time off.”

Nothing but sympathy huh? I disagree. I’m busy but if I ask someone to listen to me or discuss something with me either in an office setting or in the real world, I stop and listen – sometimes I even look at the person as they speak (imagine that). Or maybe Miss Manners is right? Maybe what we need is more vacation time or less work or even to hire more co-workers so our loads aren’t as big.

I propose this. When someone asks you something and then stares at their BlackBerry walk away. They probably won’t notice but at least you can go get some work done instead of wasting your time. Keep on doing this. Real humans deserve real attention. I’ve even heard that real humans can survive on less or even no technology. You can chime in on this topic of co-worker BlackBerry misuse at Annie’s blog – yup she has a blog too.

Most of her blog readers seem to agree with me; I especially like one comment that got straight to the point, “So much to say, but I’ll just leave 1 point: If you’re texting on the phone or on the crack, get out of the left lane on the expressway. Your erratic driving kills people.”

Nice.

What do you say? BlackBerry hot or not?