Hearing that a cellphone saved someone's life isn't exactly surprising these days, but it was the manner in which a bundle of handsets enabled doctors to continue on in a recent operation that differentiated this one from the rest. Reportedly, the backup generators at the Policlinico Juan D. Peron hospital in Argentina failed to activate after the power went out whilst an appendix surgery was ongoing, but rather than panicking, a family member gathered up a number of phones in order to provide enough light for the surgeons and anesthetists to keep on keepin' on. According to the hospital director, the operation went on without proper lighting for no more than 20 minutes, but thanks to the beaming LCDs, the fellow under the knife came through just fine.

[Via Switched, image courtesy of foto8]

It's probably of little consolation to the addicts among us who spent several terrifying hours in connectivity withdrawal -- and even less consolation, still, to the newly liberated -- but RIM's apparently figured out how its notoriously reliable back end came to a crashing halt this week. The company is now pointing its finger at "the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine" to its caching mechanism as the culprit. "Non-critical," indeed. Anyway, it seems said system routine was not put through enough testing ahead of its deployment to RIM's production systems -- and to make matters worse, its failover setup (hamsters on wheels, perhaps?) didn't pull through, significantly delaying the amount of time to get everything back online. We suspect most users are still a little too shocked at the chain of events to be steamed (yet), so consider this your strike one and two, RIM; just make sure it never happens again.