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Thursday, July 20, 2006
I dislike cell phones - but may I borrow yours?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My company participates in a softball league. We’re not very good, but we have a lot of fun.
The other night, I’m sitting on the bench at the during a game waiting for my turn at bat, and this music starts playing.
At once, three people reach into their pockets, shoes, and gym bags. It took me a second, but then I realized: It was a cell phone ringing.
I don’t have a cell phone. I may be one of the few people in North America who don’t.
I had one briefly when I worked in outside sales at my previous job, but I was glad to get rid of it.
In my mind, cell phones are a loss of privacy, a leash to unwanted demands, another way to be accessible to an encroaching world.
“Come on, Bill, you’re being silly,” my friends say. “You can always turn it off, for Pete’s sake.”
They have a point. However, I notice that few who have them ever do, even when they are in restaurants, or movie theaters, or churches. A co-worker was telling me not too long ago that she was at a funeral, and a cell phone interrupted the service. Of all places.
It gets me every time. I’m sitting in the park in downtown Duluth or I’m walking in the grocery store and someone will start talking.
I, of course, think that they are talking to me, and so I will answer them. But they aren’t talking to me. They’re talking on their cell phones.
And now, they have these things in their ear that look like what Lt. Uhura used to wear on Star Trek (Mr. Spock too). Y’all probably know what they’re called - I honestly have no idea - so it’s even harder to tell that they’re not talking to me.
And then they have the temerity to look at ME like I’m crazy because I answered them. They are standing alone in the middle of an open area, seemingly talking to nobody, and they look at me like I’m crazy because I answered. It makes sense, I guess. I mean, I am the one engaging in the “abnormal” behavior by not talking on my cell phone, or even owning a cell phone. Hmm.
I was waiting at a red light to turn east onto State Bridge from southbound Medlock Bridge the other day, and I observed the cars from those turning north onto Medlock Bridge from eastbound State Bridge. Of the 22 cars I counted, 17 people were talking on their cell phones while they were in the process of turning.
People have complained ad nauseum about the dangers of DWT (Driving While Talking) so I don’t want to touch on it too much here, except to say that given how many people I saw doing it and how many people I’ve heard complain about it - well, there’s more than a few of you out there who are hypocrites.
Maybe I notice it because I’m in a growing (shrinking) minority. I see it going on around me so often that I become more acutely aware of my lack of participation.
Until the other night. I was having some food at a local establishment and I was talking to my friend John at the bar. John was going to take a trip to Myrtle Beach. I told him I had a friend of a friend in Charleston who chartered fishing trips and that I could call my buddy to track down the number.
I asked John to borrow his cell phone to make the call. And then, I thought back and realized that it wasn’t the first time that I borrowed someone’s cell phone.
Smokers complain about OPC smokers (Other People’s Cigarettes). I’m becoming an OPCP caller (Other People’s Cell Phones). How quickly I have tumbled from my moral high ground.
Do you know any OPCP callers?
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