Every Monday (well, most of them) we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers.

This cartoon appeared in 2004 - during the heyday of the BlackBerry, the first widely-adopted handheld device that allowed users to send and receive emails on the move. Prior to that, sending an email required you to be at your desk. This new flexibility proved to be a double-edged sword. It meant that employees could pretend to their bosses and clients that they were at work when they were in a restaurant or on the golf course, but arguably it worked more in favour of the bosses in that they could now oblige their workforce to be on duty 24/7.

The BlackBerry introduced a new era of comic possibilities for Alex. It was a similar situation to the first few years of the strip, when we got gags from the potential of the recently-introduced mobile phones. Just a couple of weeks before this swimming pool cartoon appeared we ran a week of strips about some bankers checking into The Priory rehab clinic to be treated for BlackBerry addiction.

As this cartoon demonstrates, the arrival of email-capable handhelds fanned the flames of matrimonial strife on family holidays. We did many jokes on the theme of men working obsessively and secretively on holiday, while their wives were constantly trying to thwart their efforts. We never really explained whether the reason why the men insisted on working when away with their families was because they were natural workaholics; whether they were under pressure from their bosses; or whether it was just a ruse to avoid childcare obligations. We’re still not sure. Maybe it was all three.

By 2003 we found we’d written so many jokes about BlackBerrys that we contacted RIM (the company behind the BlackBerry) and cheekily suggested to them that they owed us free BlackBerrys for having given them so much publicity (we did 88 cartoons on BlackBerrys in total). Surprisingly they obliged. Apart from lunches it was one of the few freebies we got from doing the cartoon. RIM also commissioned an Alex BlackBerry desktop calendar every year for a few years. They stopped doing this in 2006, explaining that their product had achieved such saturation in the corporate world that there was no further need to market it. If we’d owned shares in the business we’d have seen this complacency as a top-of-the-market indicator and sold the lot. Sure enough, a year later Apple launched the iPhone, which rapidly consigned the clunky old BlackBerry to the dustbin of history. Many City guys clung onto their BlackBerrys for comfort and familiarity, but production of them finally ceased in 2020. RIP RIM.

Incidentally the swimming pool ruse as depicted in this cartoon would no longer work due to the increased robustness of today’s electronic devices. Russell’s teenage daughter recently accidentally left her AirPods in the pocket of her joggers and put them through a cycle in the washing machine and they still worked afterwards.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.