It seems that members of Congress and their staff are having a hard time with the new BlackBerry Storm. After using the device and finding it difficult to do simple tasks like sending email, most users on Capitol Hill are ditching the touch screen for older BlackBerrys with an actual qwerty keyboard. One staffer summed up the experience this way:

“Three days later,” Mollineau said, “I literally walk in and he’s cursing with four-letter words, and he was slamming it down, saying, ‘I can’t get e-mail to work all right.’ It just is not for people here who mainly use their BlackBerrys for that.”

Okay, where do I start? First of all, given the collective age of the members of Congress I assume that most of them would be more comfortable with a rotary phone than any kind of keypad let alone a virtual keyboard. I can imagine the thoughts running through their heads as they fired up the Storm for the first time. It would almost be like handing them a piece of alien technology found on the ground in Roswell and expecting them to use it. That just ain’t gonna happen folks.

Seriously, when the vice president of the United States asks “What is the web site number?” what do you expect?