Could the timing have been any worse? Mere days before out annual celebration of all that is love, the anti-Cupids responsible for keeping Blackberry passions smoldering have done let the fire go out again.

   Last time this happened, back in April 2007, the results were disastrous, not only in terms of broken connections, but also busted relationships between men and women robbed of their communications lifelines. Here at Buzzblog, we chronicled the case of one such victim, Rafael Paz, in a post headlined: "BlackBerry owes this guy a girlfriend."

   It's just like in that series of AT&T/Cingular TV commercials where the gaps of silence created by dropped calls lead to terrible misunderstandings - only this case involves BlackBerry and real life.

   Just as the smoke is starting to clear from today's massive BlackBerry blackout, Rafael Paz, a loss control specialist for a car rental agency, writes to tell me that he has been "getting my e-mails about one to four hours late minimum since yesterday." And it hasn't just been loss control that has suffered, he adds: "This issue sucks. I've been getting grief about it from my now ex-girlfriend thanks to this delay. She thought I was ignoring her e-mails when I was receiving them hours late."

   "We got into a really bad argument earlier in the day," he replies. "She sent me a few e-mails and when I didn't respond right away, she thought I was ignoring her and called it off. I didn't get the e-mail it was over until around 2 a.m. today."

   Of course, not everyone saw Paz as a victim, with one reader offering up this silver lining: "Whoa. I think this guy owes someone at Blackberry a beer. Sounds like they helped him chew his leg out of a BIG bear trap!"

   Love can be complicated sometimes.

   Another reader wondered if perhaps the outage was actually a Blackberry beta test of an upcoming feature: "If they could find a way to consistently block messages (text or e-mail) from wives or girlfriends then I suspect it might be sold as a service," he writes. "Call it the 'Honey, I'm trying to work here' plan."

   Unlikely, sure. (Update: This press release would indicate that it's more likely than I first imagined.)

   Blackberry executives this morning are having a hard time explaining exactly what went wrong yesterday, as was the case last year as well.

   They should count themselves lucky if they don't suffer the same fate as Raphael Paz.