Because the children are going to suffer the worst. Didn’t you read his post? About the children suffering? Can’t you see that is the saddest part? WSTotC!!!
Why just this morning, I walked past a hard-scrabble pack of lil’ raggamuffins. They were scratching lice infested hair and their clothes were hanging on them in tatters and tears. I asked them why they were suffering so. They said every time a nosy restaurant patron turns up her buttinski nose at a couple enjoying their dinner together on their own terms, their cruel Orphange director whips them extra hard and doesn’t give them their gruel.
The woman was rude. The person you’re dining with has the right to take offense if you’re texting during a meal but you have no obligation to people at other tables. So it was none of her business if you and your companion were texting, talking, reading magazines, or glaring at each other with silent loathing.
She’s entitled to an opinion of course. But it was rude of her to express that opinion where you could overhear it.
I’m with you. Jim and I had supper in a crowded lounge last Friday, and it was funny looking around the room at all the people at all the tables who were constantly picking up their electronic umbilicals. We don’t do that; I’d never say anything to another couple who are doing that, but I will think that maybe they should talk to each other once in a while and put down the devices.
Someone reading texts or texting isn’t really “there” - their attention is on something else. We went for chicken wings with a woman who checked her texts throughout the evening - it’s a real conversation-killer when someone is doing that. You’ll say something, they’ll start to answer, they’ll pick up the Crackberry, read, text, try to remember where they were in the conversation, over and over all evening long.
Yeah, I’m in the over-30 crowd and I don’t care if someone wants to send a text or check their email or take a phone call. The world doesn’t stop just because I’m with my partner, as much as I might wish it did, and I just don’t need 100% of his attention 100% of the time. (I had a doper sneer that being okay with someone checking his phone meant that lived a pathetic life and was to be pitied. Bizarre.)
Did I miss the part where it became necessary to justify using your phone at a restaurant? How people utilize their restaurant time is up to them; there’s no need to concoct elaborate scenarios about why the phones might be necessary. The OP and his date wanted to use them and did so. Getting upset about that makes as much sense as getting upset about someone wearing a polo or using metallic eyeshadow. Why the hell is it anyone else’s business?
This. CrazyCatLady and I spend about 95% of our non-working hours in the same room together, so if we felt the need to focus on nothing but each other anytime we’re together, we’d almost never do anything else.
That’s not to say that when we’re getting a sandwich at the diner I’m going to sit there and play Angry Birds. But I might take a minute or two to check my email or voice mail. (Most of the time if we’re out to eat somewhere it’s because I’ve been really busy or we’re traveling, in which case I may not have checked my messages and such in a while.) And I would expect her to do the same. I’m confident that she loves me even if she doesn’t spend the entire meal gazing dreamily into my eyes as I rattle off one fascinating anecdote after another.
My response to the passive-aggressive snarky bitch in the OP wouldn’t have been an angry retort, but a simultaneously confused and pitying look that I’ve cultivated. It says that while I don’t understand how one can be such an asshole, I understand how hard it must be to live every day of one’s life as such an asshole.
I’m in the over 30 crowd and don’t have a problem with texting in this circumstance. Oh, I get just as pissed if, say, I’m out with a friend and she is texting all of the time instead of talking. My brother answers his damn phone while we are out and talks on it for lengthy conversations, it pisses me off.
Me and my SO? We’ve been together 13 years. we spend 95% of our non-working hours together. We don’t need each other’s attention all the time. Hello, sometimes he hands me his iPhone with Angry Birds on it and tells me to play while the food is coming.
It helps, of course, that we don’t have kids - nothing takes our attention away from each other at home except our hobbies. And to be honest, I’d go batty if I had to pay attention to him every minute, and I love him dearly.
A bit of background before my anecdote: I have a very simple cell phone that I’ve spent maybe a total of 30 minutes talking on in the last year. I don’t want a smartphone, I’ve sent three texts in my life, and I abhor electronic readers.
This weekend, Mrs. Urquhart and myself were at a cigar bar here in Denver – a place with comfy leather chairs, lots of wood paneling – a very “clubby” place, and the kind of place where you sit and talk with someone, or read a book or a magazine, while enjoying a cigar and libations.
At one point, I looked up from the book I was reading and noticed a table of three women, none of whom appeared under 45 or 50 years of age and all of whom were engrossed in their electronic doo-dads. I got Mrs. Urquhart’s *(with whom I’ve had several discussions about “how sad it is that people don’t just sit and enjoy each other’s company” – she’s less bothered by it than I am) attention, because she was reading a magazine, and discretely pointed to the table.
She shrugged and pointed to my book and to her magazine.
We certainly did talk to each other while we were there, but most of the time we were engrossed in our respective reading material. There were other couples seated around us who were not reading anything at all – just talking with each other, and I had to wonder if they thought “how sad it is that people don’t just sit and enjoy each other’s company.”
I’m not sure why there is, to me, a difference between being engrossed in a printed piece of reading material and something electronic.
Maybe there shouldn’t be a difference. It’s seeming less and less reasonable that there should be, although it’s probably going to take some time for me to come around to it.
Texting isn’t gauche in Carrabba’s? Okay. I’m not an expert, so I’ll start by accepting that.
I can’t help feeling, though, that some stuff is still unacceptable, even at chain restaurants. Critiquing the behavior of strangers in public, loudly enough to be overheard, is rude, I think (at least short of extreme provocation). But for many older people the loudness is inadvertant, and there’s nothing in the OP that tells me she intended to broadcast her remarks. The OP, of course, did (at least he says he uttered his little gem loudly and “across the bar,” though the remarks he objected to came from people leaving an adjoining booth). It may be that his esprit de l’escalier was having an especially bad day, but that doesn’t really change much: her behavior, if intentional, was bad; the OP’s behavior was intentional and worse.
Mostly, though, the OP should consider this: all of us are bit players in the lives of the strangers we encounter every day. In this lady’s life, El Presidente, you were a faceless, uncredited cue for a brief, off-hand, affectionate (if factually unfounded) remark to her husband. Your ad-lib bid for a speaking role apparently went unheard. In your life, on the other hand, this woman wrote, directed, and continues to star in an epic drama whose advertising and distribution are being financed by you. She’s winning this transaction. If it came to a vote, she’d probably also come out ahead in a poll asking who was more likely the drunken boor – the guy who called out an obscene admonition in a family restaurant, or the woman who ignored it as she was leaving.
Dividing, sure. It’s kind of necessary. But that isn’t the same as not being “there”. And where a person on the phone generally has to give something like 80% of their attention to the conversation, a texter can give exactly as much attention to the texting as the presently physical situation allows. Your companion has something they want to tell you? It is infinitely easier to put the text conversation aside compared to a phone conversation.