Phone Curmudgeonry
I hate mobile phones. Okay, this isn’t a unique position, but a post is a post, so bear with me.
Now, I don’t have a great deal of time for normal phones either. There’s something inherently rude about a ringing phone, and it appears to be a social norm that the phone gets precedence over people who are in the same place as you. I’m stressing that point because it bears thinking about. Despite the fact that evolution has been working extremely hard on the idea that your immediate environment and in particular any humans nearby are fairly important and deserving of our attention, most people will switch that attention to a disembodied voice coming out of a lump of plastic at the drop of a hat (or the ring of a bell, or, as I’ll get on to, a sample of a Swedish teenager pretending to be a moped engine).
This behaviour was rude and annoying enough when it was pretty much confined to talking to people across desks (how many times have you struggled to talk to a receptionist because she put you on hold every time the phone rings?), but mobile phones have made this nonsense unavoidable and added whole new levels of irritation.
Let’s take supermarket shopping. I’m a normal(ish) bloke. I don’t like shopping unless it’s for tech-toys and even then it needs to be painless. I don’t hate the process, I just gain no enjoyment from it and I want it over as soon as possible. I’m not wandering around the average supermarket in a haze of consumer euphoria, and so when someone barrels around a corner into me yelling into a phone about what breakfast cereal they are going to buy and can’t even break their conversation for long enough to apologise, I don’t have the endorphin buffer to cushion my mood.
People on phones become ignorant by default: they will walk through doors that you are holding open without saying thanks and allow doors to shut on anyone else; they will push into queues; they will take items from you without asking. People on phones will indulge in any number of behaviours that they probably wouldn’t dream of if they didn’t have a phone clamped to their ear. They seem to feel that being on the phone is some sort of protective bubble from their immediate vicinity. It’s as if it gives them permission to bypass the exchange of those small tokens of communication and give and take that allow us to gather in groups without killing each other over having to wait to get to the free-range eggs. Even the great apes have more social grace than the average person on a mobile phone.
What is curious about this is that despite the evidence, mobile phone users consider themselves to be being more sociable by using them. Apparently, being with one or more people and ignoring them in order to talk to someone else is what “people-people” do. This makes them impervious to comment and the very idea that you might ask them to turn their phone off is alien to them and likely to result in a reaction similar to that you might expect if you asked them to hand over their lunch. Even in business meetings, your average mobile phone addict won’t show an ounce of embarassment at taking a phone call. It’s just not on their radar as something that other people might consider to be insulting as hell.
But mobile phones are going beyond simply taking the inappropriate distraction of the normal phone into the greater world, they have a whole range of related powers to infringe on other people’s personal space:
<li>They have the power to enable the user to freely discuss deeply personal issues (or just deeply banal issues) among groups of complete strangers. Here's a clue -- I don't want to know who you shared bodily fluids with on Saturday night, or what the doctor said about your rash or listen to you having a fight with your wife. I also don't want to hear about the office politics between Gary in accounting and the HR director or about the "enormous deal" you are about to sign with some plastic bag factory in Malaysia. I definitely don't want to hear any of this crap while I'm trapped in a railway carriage with you for 2 hours.</li>
<li>They apparently allow people the freedom to inflict random samples of music, speech or any other audio flotsam that they feel like onto whoever is in the vicinity. Your phone is <em>your</em> bloody phone. I don't want to hear it ringing because it's definitely not for me. It has a vibrate function, <em>use it</em>. If you have to have it make a noise, have it make a ringing noise that you want to stop rather than a tune that you feel is okay to leave playing for 30 seconds. No, I don't like the frigging tune or find "Crazy Frog" funny, just answer it and don't you <em>dare</em> play the ring tones just for laughs.</li>
<li>Not only can you do the above, but now you can talk to the phone itself! Yes, gone is the need to silently press a few buttons to call someone or manage your answering service, now you can take the extended opportunity to inflict your flapping noise-hole on everyone else by performing these functions with voice control. Yes, I and everyone else near you loves to listen to you say "delete message" 50 frigging times. Yes, we are impressed by both the technology and how many messages you have. Well done, you nob.</li>
<li>Finally, you have the ultimate power-move in mobile phone annoyance. You can take your personal phone to work and then just leave it on your desk while you bugger off somewhere else! Now, whenever it rings (preferably with the most irritating tone available) it's going to annoy the shit out of everyone without you even having to be there, a truly distributed application. For full effect, don't have the answering service pick up the unanswered call and make sure that you have a secondary annoying tone for receiving a text message. If you're not entirely sure that you won't be called two or three times an hour, call it yourself, why not?</li>
Perhaps soon there will be a backlash. Perhaps we’ll start to see the appearance of “No Phone” train carriages and restaurants and then they’ll be banned from places of business and we’ll see the phone users gathering with the smokers out on the street, pariahs.
We can but hope.
