I was on the train, calling my mom for our weekly Sunday evening chat. She was intrigued by the conversation — I was returning from the first 18 holes of golf I had played in my life — so it came as a surprise to me that when she realized I was calling her from my cell phone that she wanted me to call her later. She thinks cell phone use on buses and trains is rude.
I obediently hung up, but I wasn't being rude. Lots of other people were using cell phones, and I wasn't shouting. In fact, I'll bet you had to really listen to hear what I was saying. I've been on trains and buses with people who speak loudly, with or without cell phones, and I think they should tone it down a bit, but normal cell phone use rude? You've got to be kidding!
My mom, 91, was insistent — and she's not alone. A rudeness quiz recently published in The Reader's Digest said that the polite thing to do if your cell phone rings on a bus or a train is to say quietly something like, “I'm on the bus. I'll call you later.”
Why this backlash against cell phones? Perhaps they really do turn normally quiet people into screamers to be heard over the ambient noise. We hear a lot about eliminating dead zones and dropped calls, but can't something be done to make listening and speaking on a cell phone more pleasant?
Careful what you wish for, you say, because Blackberries seem to have been created to skip the ambient noise of a commute altogether. Who wouldn't like that? The downside is that critics call these devices “Crackberries” because they foster the notion that their owners are available 24/7, not only by cell phone but also by e-mail, at the expense of family time or personal time. Surely that scores high on the rudeness meter. Can anything be done? Smarter spam filters? An electronic secretary to screen out the really unimportant messages?
Then there are iPods, the latest in a long line of carry-with-you media that began, I think, with the Walkman (though I can't imagine that a transistor radio with an earplug was much different). Users can be in their own worlds, oblivious to their surroundings.
Laptop computers fit in the mix, too, of course, equipped with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth for constant Internet access. It wouldn't matter to my mom. If I used one on the train, she'd probably tell me not only to call her later from home, but to turn off the computer as well because it was annoying the guy sitting next to me.
Len Schiefer
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