The worst thing about cell phones not being all that important? I kept leaving mine at work, or at the store or something.
It’s not in service right now and is in a box with other computer type stuff, and I don’t miss it all that much. When I get a full time job back in my regular industry again, I’ll have to have it hooked back up.
I’m not sure that I’ll be all that thrilled with the “e-leash” having been free all this time. And family and friends who keep whining "you neeeeed to get a cEEEELL phone, I was trying to get a hold of you " I have one thing to say.
I took corrective action on this years ago with my sister.
“Can you hold, there’s another call coming in?”
“No. We’ll talk again some other time.”
Takes awhile to sink in, but eventually you may be considered important enough for an uninterrupted phone conversation.
Did you see Letterman last night? They had some guy go out and poll people on the newer movies to come out. Two of the clips was the guy asking the person to cuss him out like he was on a cell phone. The first was an old lady, who was pretty polite and didn’t cuss at all. The screen flashed “Not a New Yorker”. The next was a guy who proceeded to pretty much bleep out the entire clip. The screen flashed, of course, “A New Yorker.”
My job requires me to have the job-issued cell phone, to answer job-related calls. I need to be available 24/7 except when out of the state.
But the bastards don’t want me using my job-issued phone for any personal calls. Nor will they re-imburse me for job-related calls on my personal phone. I have the personal cell phone because I spend a lot of time on the road too, and it’s a necessity to keep plugged in with family and friends.
Frankly, I never turn my cell phones on unless I’m calling out, or (rarely) have paged someone to call me on the cell phone directly. My voice mails have not been set up, and everyone who needs to know how to get ahold of me knows they’d best call me on the damn pager, which I keep on vibrate mode rather than beeper. If I don’t respond to that, then try me at home. Or at work.
I am determined to have my cell phone be a convenience to serve me. I don’t know how to retrieve messages off my phone, check for missed calls, or even how to play the games on it. And I like it that way!
Since my hubby has been working a thousand miles away for the past year, having cell phones with unlimited cell-to-cell minutes has been a real godsend. It means we can talk to each other without thinking about $$, which is very nice.
He needs his phone for work, so everyone in the world has his number. For me, however, only about five people have my cell number, and that’s pretty much all family (and a couple people at my long-distance office, but they usually call my house line since they know I’m home during business hours). So I use my cell phone pretty much for my convenience, not other peoples’. Which means I also turn it to vibrate (or completely off) any time it might bother other people. Or when I don’t want to be bothered.
My dear hubby, however, developed a very, VERY bad habit a couple months ago – he’d call my cell phone, and if (heaven forbid!) I was, say, in the bathroom or in the other room and didn’t have my phone on my person, he would immediately hang up and call the house phone. By that time, of course, I would have just reached my cell phone and picked it up to call him back, and would then have to drop it and go hunt for a house phone. I finally went off on him after he did it for the fifteenth time in one day, and now he gives me two minutes to call him back. Two minutes. That’s all I ask.
I’m with Scarlett67. I have a cell phone, and it’s almost always on, but I keep it on vibrate. I have the minimum number of minutes Verizon lets you have for a nationwide calling plan (I don’t even know how many that is) and I’ve never gone over it once, in almost four years. I can go for weeks at a time without using the damn thing. It’s a handy and useful tool. That is all. Unless you’re a doctor on call, there is no reason for you to be a fuckwit with the phone. Be polite to the people you’re around first, and the person calling you second.
Er, even if you’re a doctor on call, there’s no reason to be a fuckwit with the phone. But there is a reason for you to use it when it might otherwise be unacceptable.
Why would this offend you so much? It’s a mobile phone. The whole idea behind them is to take them around with you and use them when you are away. I can understand that perhaps you do not use yours in this way, but I can assure you that most cellphone users do. I wouldn’t have given this question a second thought.
Moreover, the assumption that you have one would come from the fact that cellphone penetration in the US (according to Wikipedia) is approximately 66%. If you did not, then you would be in the minority.
Getting to the OP: Everything you cite is an example of poor manners or your overreaction to someone else’s private activities.
Mine phone is a phone, and a web browser, and a media player / recorder, and modem for my iPAQ, and a camera, and an IM client, and an e-mail client, and a calendar, and a contact manager, because that’s what I want in my phone. Who are you to tell me that I shouldn’t have such a thing? It’s my damn money and I’ll do with it what I want. It doesn’t affect you at all, because I am quiet and respectful of my surroundings when I am using it.
Bad manners on the part of the person to whom you are speaking or interacting. The cellphone just gives that person another way to be rude.
Who are you to judge whether or not another person needs a BlackBerry or another PDA? I use mine to keep myself entertained on long stretches between classes and on flights and other trips. Again, if it’s not directly affecting you, why the hell do you care? Someone sitting across the room tapping out an e-mail on a PDA is in no way your concern. I’m not trying to impress anyone; I work in a grocery store, for God’s sake. No one’s impressed by that, nor by my PDA. They’re so widespread that they’re becoming commodities anyway.
I can understand you pitting someone for acting rudely, or ignoring you when you’re speaking, or whatever, but don’t blame the device. Many people in this thread seem to hate the phone, but not the owner. The owner is to blame, not nifty gadgets.
In public places, like restaurants and libraries, my phone is on vibrate. In louder settings, like the mall or the street, it rings. When I’m at a restaurant and it vibes in my pocket, I get up from the table and take the call. Same as when I’m someone else’s house. When I’m speaking to someone, and it rings, I silence it and will return the call later. Ditto on text messages. But these are practices of etiquette, and have nothing to do with the phone itself.
I’m kinda off the deep end here, but that’s because I’m tired of these roughly once-a-month DAMN CELLPHONE threads, when you mean DAMN PEOPLE.
In praise of cell phones:
In high school, I had a pager. Back when payphone calls were 0.25, I would often receive voice mail pages from family members who needed to leave important information (like what time I would be picked up from practice, etc.). Then the cost of a payphone call shot to .035, and all of a sudden, for every legitimately important voice mail page I received, I also received at least two voice mails with this exact message: “Hey, it’s so-and-so, call me back at MEM-ORON.” FOR THE LOVE LOVE OF OG! WHY DID YOU NOT PAGE ME WITH THE NUMBER TO CALL YOU AT, INSTEAD OF LEAVING A VOICE MAIL?! I AM NOW OUT OF CHANGE FROM CHECKING THE VOICE MAIL AND CANNOT CALL YOU BACK!!!
:: pant, pant, pant::
I’ve never had that problem with cell phones!
Also: A cell phone is what enabled me to bail out a best friend who was in serious trouble at 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday night. My cell phone doubles as my alarm clock in the morning! Lastly (bear with me, almost done praising), I don’t use a landline except for the one provided to me in my work office to conduct work-related business. I found that I simply have no use for landlines, as I’m never home at the moments when I need to talk to people and payphones generally suck. I have “only” 200 minutes a month and I have never gone over.
Now back to your regularly scheduled rant:
Conversely, the next time that fucking bitch of a “friend” BEGS me to go to a movie with her, and then proceeds to answer the five calls she receives on her phone throughout (I don’t care if it’s your mother checking to see if you’ve been raped/kidnapped/assaulted, she knew you were going to be at a movie for the next 2 hours, 17 minutes and 32 seconds and has NO FUCKING REASON to check up on you when you’re 22 years old, so grow the fuck up and turn off the damn phone), I’m going to rip it out of her hands and hurl it as far as I can down the aisle (not into the seats, but down the stairs of AMC’s tiered-style seating). May it shatter into many pieces on the metal handrail.
I don’t know how great the penetration of “Short Message Texts” are at the moment in North America, but down here in Australia and in countries the world over which use variations of the GSM Network Technology, SMS’s are amazingly ubiquitous.
Problem is though, they’re only 160 charactes a pop and people use them (in my experience) as a means to say things they would never say if they were talking in real time - let alone in person.
Accordingly, I make it a policy to never send SMS’s to anyone - indeed, I turned the function off. Also, I’m also very wary nowadays of people who are “quasi addicted” to sending SMS’s all the time (instead of making a genuine person to person phone call). For mine, it’s a form of rudeness, but edging towards the obsessive or cowardly versions of rudeness, if you know what I mean.
[end hijack]
As for the OP? Yep, it’s true… it’s the lack of manners, not the phones themselves, which is offensive. Recognising this, I rarely carry my mobile phone in public, and I deliberately turned off my capacity to receive Voice Mail about 6 months ago. I simply got sick and tired all the time of running up costs through retrieving superfluous Voice Mails which stated stuff like “Hi, this is so and so… can you call me back please?”
Holy Fuck I find that irritating. Seriously, if you’ve gotten as far as my Voice Mail mechanism, it means my phone knows that you rang - I’ll call you back if I want to - so do me the courtesy please of leaving a message which states the nature of your business or don’t leave a message at all. To do the former simply causes me to incur greater costs to achieve the same goal! Can’t you see that?
I love that. I will also use that for people who allow themselves to be distracted by everything going on around them when I’m trying to have a phone conversation with them (usually one that they initiated). Talk with me, or talk to the people you’re with - not both.
I don’t have any friends who are rude enough to take multiple calls while we’re out socializing, but I think I would have to leave if that was going on. I have better things to do than sit here staring at my nails while you have multiple conversations.
Forgot to address the OP: In my place of work, it is mandated that all personal wireless devices are turned off when on the clock. Anyone caught with a cell phone ringing during working hours would be severly reprimanded. During a meeting? Fuhgeddaboudit, and good luck getting that raise for the next several years…!
I disagree that this is a case of the people not the device. I know more than a few people who are completely reasonable when a land line is inturrupting real live social life…they politely excuse themselves, let the machine get it, briefly tell the caller they are busy, wouldn’t dream of taking a call while we were watching a movie at home. It’s puzzling to see these same people turn into self-absorbed rudes when the cell goes off. It’s as if the mobile aspect of the device deceives them into thinking these calls (or they themselves) are more important than anything else in earshot.
I’m with the OP. And stop bejeweling the damn things. That’s just dumb.
Yeah, first time I heard a cell go off at a meeting and saw the person take it I was completely flabbergasted.
Like others, mine is only intermittently on and always on vibrate and only a very few people know the number.
Some people only have a cell phone, so I can see keeping it on more often, but it can stay on vibrate, and assuming it does, that also means it can take a message without disturbing anyone so that the owner can call back if the owner happens to be doing something like attending a meeting or riding a bus full of napping passengers on the freakin’ highway, as God intended during long stretches of driving!
You would think this would be obvious, but of course it manifestly isn’t. My bus rides to and from work are now a cacophony of ring tones and people talking 30 or 40 decibels louder than they would if they were simply holding a conversation with the person sitting next to them.
There is the occasional glorious exception, someone who can keep the phone on vibrate and carry on a conversation, right next to me even, without disturbing me. But this kind of person is very very rare.
Cell phone yakkers on the train… don’t get me started.
My own cell phone lives in the glove compartment of my car. Turned off unless I want to call someone. Left on only if I’m expecting a call back, which happens only for stuff like a veterinary emergency (no phone at the barn).
I think there’s a special circle of hell reserved for people who love their ring tones so much that they have to let the crank-ass little ditty play all the way through… in the middle of the public library.
Oooh yeah. Call waiting has to be humankind’s rudest invention.
Either the person you’re talking with is worth talking with, or they’re not. If they’re not, for pity’s sake just hang up the damn phone. Because you just know that someone much more important, somewhere out there in the universe, is just dying to get through to you. And there’s absolutely no chance they’ll call back if they get a busy signal. There goes your one and only chance. Thbft.
I’d love to get ahold of whoever it was that invented call waiting and lock them in a room with a bunch of cheap cell phones playing “Fuer Elise.” Fuer eternity.
