Ah, I remember years before the internet and message boards, and it seemed to work out just fine. Perhaps you should give it up. I don’t see why you have to sit and post messages.
My husband has employees working 24/7 running computers at a hospital, and it doesn’t matter what time of the day or night it is, he gets calls on his cell phone when there’s a problem – the label printer in the inpatient pharmacy crashes, the stat lab connection goes wonky, etc., etc. And although he often works 12-hour days already, he still gets calls to and from other work folks, and often nonstop for an hour or two after he comes home, because hospitals don’t just stop running at 3:00.
So yes, he wears a bluetooth headset in the car. And yes, he needs to take the calls. If he stayed at work to answer all the calls, he’d be putting in 15-hour days every day, or sometimes might as well just move in his office and stay there. Frankly, the only way to even try to have a life most weekdays is to put on the headset and hit the car and get out in the godawful traffic. Or on weekends, or in the middle of the night – he even gets calls occasionally when he’s on vacation because there’s a crisis and the person who’s supposed to be on call isn’t answering their phone. And yes, the on-call person gets in trouble later, but in the meantime there’s still a problem that the hospital needs solved sooner rather than later, and if he’s the only one available, so be it. (And no, they don’t pay him enough for the aggravation!)
Just because you only need to use the phone in the car to get directions doesn’t mean no one else has any important reason to be contacted just because they’re between locations.
What an odd and pointless comment.
Scroll back to post #44 of this thread.
People bitch because they see so many people paying more attention to their cell phone conversations than they are to their driving. There might be a few cases as some have suggested where someone’s work life is so hectic that they need to use a cell phone while driving, but if only those people were guilty of it I doubt there would be many complaints. Will the world really come to an end if you let someone calling you leave a message on voice-mail and you take 5 minutes to pull over and call them back?
Yes, because pulling over on a highway in a non-emergency situation in my state can get you a ticket. Driving on said highway while talking to somebody that called me, doesn’t have that risk.
And I don’t do things just because I NEED to. I do them because I want to, or like to. This world is a faster moving world than the one you may be used to. People like convenience and they like to stay connected.
All of you bitching pretty are pretty much doing what the older generation have alway done, be it the damn younger generations walk-mans, new fangled cars with stereos, MP3 players, or whatever new thing you aren’t used to.
Personally I am tired of hearing people bitch about cell phones in general. Some have a legitimate complaint, like those standing in line chatting. Driving down a highway talking on your cell phone isn’t the end of the world. People have different priorities, and staying connected to people while out and about is one for many people, no matter how recent the trend is. FWIW, I am only sick of it, because my Dad is one of those that bitch and complain anytime he sees somebody talking on a cell phone, no matter where. He has a cell phone, and occasionally uses it, but to him, OTHER people using a cell phone is bad. :rolleyes:
Exactly, and your comment was no less odd or pointless. Just because you have gotten by without something in the past, is no reason to assume it should be done without in the present. If you can’t see that the two are similar, then you need to re-evaluate your opinion.
See, I think this is the problems with many of the people in this thread. They are selfish, self-centered people that seem to think how and why they do things a certain way is the way everybody should. They either lack imagination or empathy, and can’t see past their own little box of a life and consider that other people may have legitimate reasons (even aside from work) for talking on a cell phone (or doing any number of other things).
How the hell do you know that the person talking on their cell phone while driving down the road isn’t talking to somebody that is having an emergency, a relative in a hospital, or that they were driving to work and a friend called and said they had a flat tire.
Why pull over on the side of the road to answer the cell phone, when with a bluetooth ear piece, you don’t have to cause traffic problems or be late wherever you are going?
Also, sometimes a 4 hour drive on a highway is made much more fun by calling a friend and chatting for a couple hours. And most highway driving doesn’t take so much concentration you can’t have a phone conversation.
And not pulling over can get people killed. OK - So maybe your caller would need to wait 15 minutes rather than the 5 I suggested to you can get stop in a safe and non-ticketable area. As I said, read post 44 of this thread.
It has no more risk of getting you killed than talking to your passenger. Probably less of a risk, since when you are talking on a phone you aren’t looking over at them constantly.
Yet how many people do you see bitching about people having conversations with their passenger? I have never seen such a thing. Yet it is obviously more dangerous than a cell phone (much more dangerous than a cell phone with a hands free earpiece).
Now, I realize that dialing and talking on a cell phone without a hands free unit is dangerous and stupid. But that isn’t what this is about. You are apparently saying a bluetooth earpiece is as dangerous as not having one, which is bullshit. And it is even less dangerous if you have voice activated dialing.
Did you read post 44 on this thread?
I guess that it’s because my Lovely and Wonderful Wife feels the need to make
sure I’m not banging one of her friends like a screen door in a hurricane . If it
was just my passenger side paw , we would all know what I’m doing 
For some reason I had missed post 44, probably because of a habit of skipping a post that hast a whole lot of quoted text with no comments underneath. A bad habit I admit.
However, I’m not convinced by it.
Especially this tidbit:
Not so. SOME passengers may observe if there is a dangerous traffic situation, but rarely is this ever the case. At least in my experience. Most passengers barely even pay attention to traffic situations, let alone stop talking unless there is something serious going on, like sudden sharp breaking.
And even so, talking on the phone is not always a two way thing. Sometimes talking on the phone is listening to the other person. Also, there is the adaption of conversation styles with the advent of the cell phone. People used to sit around chatting and focusing on the conversation, but newer conversations tend to be disjointed and often repeated.
Now some people may be irresponsible and keep talking and thinking about what they are doing, but I, and many people I now, are fully capable of stopping talking mid-sentence and forgetting whatever was going on that second. We also are responsible for prioritizing our thoughts and attention. When I am talking on a cell phone, most of my attention is on the road, and the conversation comes secondary.
At any rate, none of the studies are taken seriously that legislation is taken against driving and talking on the cell phone, and that speaks volumes. If it were as dangerous as many old curmudgeons such as yourself say it is, there would be such legislation in effect.
Personally I despise people that bitch about it as much as you apparently despise people that talk and drive. I don’t personally have a bluetooth piece, nor do I talk and drive (except on a non-busy highway during a long trip, and when I do, I still pay attention, even if it annoys the other person that I am not responsive to their conversation), but I do get tired of hearing old fuddy duddies bitch and moan about how the younger generation talks on the cell phones, and bitch about how dependent on computers they are, or why they walk around with MP3 players plugged in all the time.
If there is any reasons 70 years as a lifespan is good enough, this should be the main reason. Just to stop hearing about how some stupid 50 year old drives should be the only way. Good, keep bitching, in 20 years you will be gone, and it will be the norm. No matter how much you bitch, it ain’t going to stop.
One of the first things many shy people have to learn when it comes to overcoming their shyness is that other people aren’t thinking about them that much, aren’t judging them, aren’t paying that much attention.
And then threads like this prove the exact opposite.
With that type of logic, it seems that some people think drivers should sit motionless, stare straight ahead, no radio, no comments from or to passengers allowed, no looking at anything but the road and vehicles in front and in the mirrors and only complete and utter silence and dedication to the cause of driving
[quote]
Reeeaaally nice straw man. Nobody is asserting any such thing.
I didn’t say they were. I said “seems that some think that”.
Other sites read and noted. I would be interested in seeing studies that compared drivers who had other distractions in the vehicle (driver eating and drinking lunch, screaming children, arguing spouses, coworkers talking project and business, etc) other than cell phones and then seeing what the actual percentage was. Your cites didn’t say what the control (if any) consisted of.
IOW, if the control drivers were my aforementioned totally silent drivers alone in the vehicle. If they did in fact compare drivers involved in other distractions, what were they? And what were the percentages there?
Somehow the first half of my replies to you were eaten…sorry if I miss part of what you asked…
How is talking handsfree on the phone any different than being in a conversation with your passenger(s),
So? This is where the driver says “hang on”, or “call back”.
or listening to an amusing or interesting radio program?
Hmm, then the people in Lien’s study don’t listen to talk radio the way most of the people I know do. I’m half joking here.
[quote}Lien said the study can be applied to the real world, especially to drivers who talk on cell phones. On the surface, she said, it appears that drivers are trying to accomplish just two tasks – driving and conversing. But each task is complicated and multi-faceted, greatly increasing the “cost” of switching. The result: inattention and slow reaction times.
She/he doesn’t address my earlier question. How is this different from an intense conversation with a passenger? Not that I’m saying that sort of distraction is okay, I just don’t see the difference. And Lien doesn’t address that part, just the part that states that the caller isn’t aware of what’s going on (of course not, that’s why you communicate to him/her what is going on!).
This is pretty much the same thing quoted above, and again, this is where the driver tells the caller what is going on in a dangerous traffic situation.
Why, if you can tell a passenger to be quiet a moment, wouldn’t a person do the same to the caller?
(quoted post snipped)
Do you mean like this list of countries and states in the US with laws banning cell phone use while driving?
While I wouldn’t go that far, I definitely think that more drivers should make more of an effort to avoid unnecessary distractions and multitasking. Driving is an inherently dangerous activity and inattentive/distracted drivers kill lots of people.
Sure, some compromises have to be made for accomodating other activities when necessary. But I don’t like the fact that the default attitude generally seems to be “There’s no reason I shouldn’t do this other distracting activity while driving if I feel I can handle it” rather than “I should minimize other distracting activities while driving as much as I can.”
That was addressed in the last quote in post#44, from a study that found that “Conversations with passengers reduce a driver’s attention, but they aren’t as unsafe as talking on a phone.” So yeah, conversations with passengers are also distracting, but less so than phone conversations.
(One reason for this might be that the pace of live conversations tends to be more tolerant of pauses or silences. If you don’t respond for ten or fifteen seconds during a phone conversation, the other person is more likely to drag your attention back with queries like “Hello? Are you there? Did we get cut off?”)
Again, the big difference is that a radio program isn’t interactive. This was addressed in the same post.
Again, the point isn’t that other activities like listening to the radio or talking to a passenger don’t have some distracting effect. The point is that, according to several studies, they don’t have as much distracting effect as talking on the phone, handsfree or otherwise. Either find a cite that refutes this evidence, or stop claiming that there’s no difference in the effects of these activities.
Maybe so. But drivers are notoriously poor judges of their abilities, as evidenced by the studies that show that large majorities of drivers think they have above-average driving skills. Given the choice between your subjective opinion that you and lots of people you know aren’t significantly distracted by talking on the phone while driving, and quantitative studies showing evidence that most people are significantly distracted by talking on the phone while driving, I think I’d be inclined to trust the studies’ conclusions over yours.
Really? You have a touching faith in the government’s ability always to do what’s best for its citizens without being pressured or prompted.
You forgot the fine print at the top of that list:
In other words, a bluetooth headset is just fine in ALL those countries.
Want to try another argument?
Not in all parts of all of them, as you’ll see from the notes on the individual countries. Moreover, some countries where handsfree phone use during driving isn’t actually banned still impose special penalties (pdf file) on drivers who get into accidents while using them.
I remember the same rant (not on this board for obvious reasons) about cell phones about 10-15 years ago. I guess you get over it.
Originally Posted by Epimetheus:
“I think people that bitch about what others do because they don’t ever do it, or can’t understand why others would is ridiculous and inconsiderate to boot.”
What is ridiculous and inconsiderate are rude fucks who are yapping away, see that their exit is a quarter mile away, and suddenly blast over 3 or 4 lanes without warning.
What is ridiculous and inconsiderate is the cellphone moron going 50 in the fast lane, blissfully unaware of anything happening outside of the car.
What is ridiculous and inconsiderate is the yapping asshole who sits through a left turn light.
What is ridiculous and inconsiderate is the stupid yapping fuck who tries to change lanes and cuts somebody off because he didn’t notice the car was right fucking beside him.
What is ridiculous and inconsiderate is the yapping dipshit who locks up his brakes because he didn’t notice the car in front of him signal and slow down to make a turn.
I could go on and on.
I see this bullshit every goddamn day, and you are a fucking idiot if you think that even with a hands-free, you can focus your full attention on the fucking road. You haven’t had an accident, so fucking what. I wonder how many times you have fucked other drivers around, and not even noticed?