Did you read about the guy who was arrested for using a cell phone jammer on a commuter train?
LOL! Good for him. What a nuisance cell phone yappers are!
Places where people have to be crammed together in public — like trains and theaters and churches and shopping malls — should be equipped with cell phone jammers as a matter of course. They could be set to turn off in an emergency, but during business as usual, it shouldn’t be a matter of politely asking people to turn the damn things off: it should be a matter of course that the things don’t work in those places.
Recently one of the professional-grade singers in the Chamber Choir remarked on some nitwit’s phone having gone off in the middle of a complex, difficult piece. She said it messed up the rest of the performance of that piece: the phone’s ringer was a “song” and the jingly notes distracted the choir enough to cause them to lose track of the musical line. They felt the performance was spoiled — meaning it was also spoiled for everyone in the audience. But by golly, that phone subscriber didn’t miss a single hail from friends and merchandisers!
The other day, the weather was astonishingly beautiful, so I went out for a one-mile walk around the park. As I’m trotting along, what should I encounter but a woman with two adorable children, one in a stroller and one, about four or five, prancing along the sidewalk….and what’s she doing?
Yakking on the phone!
She didn’t even seem to be aware of the kids’ presence, so engrossed was she in her chatfest.
Damn! Lady, have you no clue that your kids need your attention? And will you be surprised when they get into trouble as teenagers? Or fail in school because you’ve been too distracted all their lives to teach them anything?
Out of curiosity, I decided to keep track of the number of people who were yapping on the phone while walking vis-à-vis the total number of people I encountered.
And the number? Four out of ten.
That’s right. Forty percent of walkers were distracting themselves from a spectacular day in a beautiful park where children were playing and birds were singing and leaves were whispering…by yammering on the goddamn phone.
Their loss. Ours, too: they’re distracting everyone else as they anaesthetize themselves to the world around them.
Does it not occur to the phone-yackers that the details of their personal lives or the sound of their babbling voices is not what other people want to focus on? Or even that they are NOT the focus of the universe? Honest to God.
Another time I turned onto a neighborhood street from Feeder Street NS about 50 or 100 feet ahead of another woman who was coming up Feeder from the south. She wasn’t talking into the phone. She was yelling into the phone. The sound of her noise was just flat grating: she overrode everything around her.
What is it about a cell phone that makes some people feel they have to shout into it to be heard?
This broad was hollering into the phone at the top of her already unpleasantly sharp voice. And she walked fast enough to keep up with me — yakking didn’t distract her from moving her legs and feet. I stepped it up to get out of hearing, to no avail. Finally I broke into a run, trying to put some distance between us: didn’t help.
Didn’t get rid of her annoying voice until I ran around the corner and up another neighborhood street.
No wonder the less stable among us pick up guns and start shooting. Criminey!
I agree that phones should be silenced at events/performances, but when out in public how is having a conversation into a phone any different than having a conversation with another person who is physically present? Surely you are not suggesting that we should all be perfectly silent when not within the confines of our dwelling.
Most people who are speaking face to face don’t do so at the top of their lungs. But apparently some people still don’t understand that a cell phone’s mic can pick up sounds spoken in a normal tone of voice, and so they SHOUT INTO THE PHONE!!! Like that. Everyone within a quarter-mile gets to listen to half a conversation, whether they care to or not.
Yapping into the phone when you’re taking the kids for a walk speaks to our culture of distraction. If you don’t want to be with kids, don’t have kids. Or put them up at day care, where they’ll at least be with other human beings who can bring themselves to pay attention to them.
I’m not saying people should be perfectly silent when out of doors. But they should have a little consideration for the strangers around them and keep their voices down to normal conversational levels.
I see a lot of your point but I can’t agree with your celebrating the guy that used a jammer. What if someone went on a train and instead of just doing it to shut people up, did it so that he could rob people, or worse? I guess I just think that in a case like this, it goes back to the phrase that I now say at least once a day (with a six year old and four year old) that “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
I also think that while it’s definitely true that people spend more time with their faces in their phones, I have found that it doesn’t help to get angry about it. I just get amused more than anything at how silly they look. I figure as long as I’m taking in what’s around me, that’s really what counts.
As far as the extra noise, you have to remember that at least you’re only hearing one side of the conversation. I was at the gym last week and two women went on nearby treadmills and proceeded to yell back and forth at one another for their 30 minute workout. In that case, one of them on a cell phone would have been MUCH more favorable than both of them, because with both of them there, I had twice the noise to put up with. LOL!
Ha hah!!! Yes, only ONE hollering woman would have been a huge improvement! 😀
I see your point about the potential thieves. But… Long before people carried phones with them, we rode trains and buses with no more risk of theft and mayhem than we have now. People still get robbed on public transit today, willy nilly — a thief or thug can hop off the bus and disappear into a crowd long before a police officer can show up.
Actually, when I was a kid, 12 to 14 years old, I used to ride the San Francisco public buses and streetcars to school every day. No one felt unsafe, and no one thought it was inappropriate for a 12-year-old to ride alone. Today I wouldn’t let my kid ride a Phoenix city bus alone on a bet! I don’t feel safe on them myself, no matter how many fellow riders have cell phones with them.