Any talking in an elevayor is loud, and yes, hearing half a conversation is viscerally annoying in a way that hearing both sides is not. I read a study more recently which showed that it was more cognitively irritating because it’s not a natural thing for the brain to try to process.
People do not talk on cellphones in a normal voice, in my experience.
Am I the only one who notices that the woman herself recognized that her behavior was out of line?
Perhaps compulsive is a better word for her behavior than rude.
I was frightened by a strange, “strange” man on an elevator once. Didn’t mean to end up alone with him but that’s what happened. I didn’t see his cell and after traveling in silence for a couple of floors he whispered (I thought) suggestively, “What do you want?”
“Just the first floor.” I stammered nervously.
And then he said, “I’ll stop at the corner store and pick it up on my way home.”
Ugh.
Um, no… I realized that some people might be thinking about, like, the elevator lobbies in the World Trade Center, so I said that to make it clear that it’s a small place where everybody knows everybody. Log in your eye, maybe? I wasn’t even making any judgments about New York.
Psst… the World Trade Center isn’t there anymore.
Yes, but it’s a good example of a building designed to have massive elevator lobbies with which many people are familiar.
I think that in that situation, if she’s going to continue her call, politeness dictates that the young woman should steer her half of the conversation to stuff that the people around her are going to want to listen to.
I personally don’t see the rudeness, and I can get fairly annoyed when people use cell phones in inappropriate places (like while trying to conduct business at a store, bank, McDonald’s, etc.) Maybe I’ve just taken enough public transportation back in the day that I really don’t give a shit about this.
Well, I guess part of why I thought it was rude (and it was loud, by the way) is that because the elevator vestibule is very small (not much larger than the elevator) and it is such a close working environment, it kept the rest of us from doing our accustomed small talk.
I knew my answer was going to be “Both” before I opened the thread. And I knew it was going to involve public noise.
If the young person was reading a book, or even quietly bopping along to her ipod with a pleasant smile, you wouldn’t be bothered, would you? If she was smiling and texting, you wouldn’t care, either.
In the situation described you should obviously listen to her conversation.
Spot on.
Yes. (It IS rude and you ARE old :D) Me too.
I sat on a train recently listening to the teen to 20-something twit behind me jabber loudly about NOTHING on her cell phone for 40 minutes…(“Hey, whatcha doing? Nothing. We just passed wherever…yeah, that facebook posting was so stupid. I know. Blah, fucking BLAH!” :smack:) I was trying to read/study for a test, but her incessant jabbering about NOTHING other than “I’m bored sitting on a train and just need to play with my phone since I can’t READ or just BE w/o constant stimulation” prevented me from concentrating. (yes, THAT loud and distracting).
I was in a shitty mood that day anyway, and as I got off, I said, “I SO enjoyed overhearing your conversation the whole ride. Thanks!” :rolleyes:
I don’t regret doing so, even though that sort of thing is usually against my nature. I tend to suck up a hell of a lot w/o commenting.
I HAVE a cell phone. Just got a new one yesterday…pretty cool. But I don’t LIVE on the damn thing and people who do annoy the hell out of me. Just one of my pet peeves. And YES, it IS rude, imo, to subject people to your pointless/private conversations and more so to do so to those you know and are supposed to be hanging out with.
Yep, grumpy old lady at 44. Whatever. 
Yeah, but see, you kinda were. Look, I know you have this notion that you’re carrying a torch for good old fashioned Southern charm, and that’s fine and all (if also more than a bit twee). But it rises to an off-putting level when you think your Suzanne Sugarbaker act entitles you to expect other people, people you don’t know, to terminate their phone calls early just because you’re sharing a corridor with them for a half-minute and want their undivided attention as you smile wanly at them.
Seems the young woman acknowledged that to everyone, I’m tellin’ ya.
This isn’t about a moment’s passing. This is about standing in a small, shared semi-public indoor space. It is always rude to subject other people to your phone conversations in such a setting.
And, by the way, the fact that the others present are strangers makes it more rude, not less.
If that is the case then, yes, rude. I was not clear on this point. If she were just talking to somebody on the phone, no big deal. If she were talking so loud as to prevent other conversation, yes, rude.
No, it doesn’t. That’s what lobbies are for. Ever see a movie from the forties or the fifties, when all the reporters rush out to the lobby to phone in their reports?
Being in the lobby at the same time as someone else does not convert it into a social mixer. It’s perfectly fine to conduct a phone conversation at normal indoor volumes – a conversation, I hasten to point out, that etiquette bids you to pretend you haven’t heard.
What makes the OP’s demands more remarkable is that even though they’ve apparently been working together for quite a while, the OP hasn’t even bothered to learn the phone-using party’s name. This is, to my mind, a very attenuated relationship to go around demanding that she never use her cell phone in the non-social environs of a building’s elevator lobby.
I’m middle-aged and I don’t use a cellphone but I don’t see this as rude. My personal opinion is that it’s usually okay to have a cell-phone conversation anywhere it would be appropriate to have a face-to-face conversation.
If her friend had been on the elevator with her and the two of them had continued their conversation without greeting you, would you have felt it was rude? Was the volume of her voice or the topic of the conversation anything that would have been inappropriate if she had been talking to her friend in person? Was she interfering with people trying to get on or off the eleavtor? If not, then I don’t see a problem.
To the phone booths, you mean? I lament their loss.
A lobby is not a “mixer,” but it is a kind of social space. It is enclosed, and it is at least semi-public.
Telephone conversation is not typically conducted at normal indoor volumes. Almost everyone is louder, except people who are consciously keeping their voice low and trying to avoid being overheard. (Even they often forget and let their volume rise. This is occasionally amusing.)
Etiquette is strained.
It has nothing to do with the relationship between them, in my view.
Telephone conversations are not like face-to-face conversations.
When two people are talking in close physical proximity (often particularly when they have been walking together) their voices and body language become closely modulated to the person they are speaking with. (Of course some people are just louder than others, but that difference is maintained when they get on the phone.) The rhythm of one speaking, then the other, bonds them; they form a sort of social molecule. As long as the two of them are getting along, not having a fight, they do not disturb the social space. Whereas one person, distracted from her or his actual physical surroundings, speaking at unnatural volume to a person not present–whose responses are not present–is a disruption.
It isn’t a lobby like a big open space. That’s what I mentioned skyscrapers for, but you were too busy getting all butt-hurt about New York City to notice. It’s a little enclosed space where you wait for the elevator. Not much bigger than the elevator itself.
And what on earth does the size of a building and the degree to which people know each other have to do with Southern charm? Seriously?
I get what they were saying, no offense. You may not have intended it to sound like this, but it was like:
Now, this is a small office building where we’re all friends and know each other, and it’s so much nicer than those New York skyscrapers where no one knows anyone and it’s just so impersonal, unlike our nice (Southern) office!
That was the mild impression that I got, as well.