Just when I thought that cell phones were the most annoying invention of the last 20 years, now comes a new annoyance:
Walkie Talkie Cell Phones
No, it’s not enough to have the ability to simply dial numbers on a pad thusly to be connected to an ever important matter on the other end. Not enough to cleverly program your phone to ring to the tune of “William Tell Overture” or “Fur Elise”. No…now you must…you must, I say!…have at your fingertips the ability to press one and only one button and yell at the top of your lungs, “We’re in parking lot G!!” or “Can you see me waving at you??!! We’re right here!!” or “I’ll be home in 5 minutes” into your state of the art electronic torture mechanism.
Must…control…impulse to grab your WT and sling it into river…!!!
Actually, the Nextel walkie talkie feature is an extremely cost effective way of organizing work functions. When a team shows up at a customer site, they need not use local phones or trash their own calling minutes. Instead, someone on the roof can easily ask another colleague on the ground to check a circuit breaker or what have you.
This won’t prevent the usual idiots from hogging bandwidth by playing “hide and seek” with their friends, but such is life.
I went to a concert at Severance Hall in Cleveland last night. The Cleveland Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, and a childrens’ choir peforming the Berlioz War Requeim.
The extraneous sounds were a few coughs and some careful page turning of the program. It was wonderful! Maybe people have finally learned that they don’t need to accept a phone call while at a concert.
I don’t really mind the walkie talkie type cell phones, but the adds for them suck. They don’t emphasize the advantages of the device. Instead, they make it look like a nice toy to be used by individuals to talk with the family instead of a cell phone. I can see how it would be very useful in certain jobs and on job sites, but the advertising fails miserably at pointing this out.
This isn’t as ‘new’ as some suggestions that people will come up with, but it’s fairly recent (or at least I’ve only noticed it in the past couple of years).
I hate those automated telephone systems that say, ‘We don’t pay enough people to answer incoming calls so please just hang on forever while we keep you waiting’. That’s not the new bit. The more recent addition is to stuff the ‘please wait forever’ message with adverts for how brilliant the company is and how many awards their products have won and how many prizes they’ve won for excellent service and other meretricious crap while they keep you hanging on forever. That really is unnecessarily infuriating.