Lost your BlackBerry? Ooh, you're in trouble now.

Roger Baker, chief information officer of the Veterans Affairs Department, was talking with reporters today about a recent report showing that VA employees lost 13 BlackBerry devices in a single month.

Asked if there should be punishments for the VA doctors and others who lost the devices, Baker said, “Sure, we should ground those doctors for a month and not let them out of the building."

He quickly added: “I’m being facetious, of course.” The cost of a few lost devices is trivial compared to the efficiences that they bring to doctors and other employees, he said.

Baker also described an advance in the Virtual Lifetime Record development program mad through the VA’s adoption of the Defense Department's nine-digit Electronic Data Interchange Personal Identifier system. The significance of the adoption was difficult to explain in a brief announcement, he told reporters.

“I couldn’t figure out how to do a press release on it that was fewer than four pages,” Baker said.