Why checking my RSS feeds first thing is a good idea.

I woke up at my normal time this morning and made a cup of coffee. I started to read some before checking my RSS feeds. While the coffee was brewing I picked up my Blackberry to check my emails from overnight.

Nothing. This is not a good sign. I have several status messages that are automatically sent that shoud be waiting for me.
I sent myself a test message.
Got a big red X.

So I booted my laptop and logged in to check things. Both BES and email servers were running. Lots of weird messages on BES server. Nothing I had ever seen before. Tried a few things and was able to clear up some of the messages, but still not messages coming or going. Checked my email server and no problems there. Checked my email and all of my automated messages from overnight were there.

I know that I should have gone to Blackberry support but held off. Normally I would have been more receptive to going directly to the Blackberry support but this week has been full of things going wrong and I just figured that this was just another one. After about an hour of troubleshooting I remembered that a PIN message bypasses the server. So I sent my Boss a PIN. Again, big red X.

Now I put 2 and 2 together and decided that it was a RIM issue. So now I pulled up my RSS feeds and one of the first things I saw was this article from Network World. If I had checked my feeds first thing like I usually do I would have had a much more productive hour.