I don’t agree with the OP’s conclusion, either. A loud conversation in which I hear both sides is nowhere near as annoying to me as a loud cell phone conversation. I’m not entirely sure why this is, either, but it is. Maybe because when you hear both sides, you feel like a part of the conversation (a far away, only listening part), and when it’s just one person shouting into a phone, you feel somewhat slighted, like they’re shutting you out, if that makes any sense.
I KILLING YOUR THREAD!!!
What?
I must admit I’ve been guilty of talking too loud on the phone myself.
I try to be mindful of my volume but sometimes I get carried away! :smack:
As far as I understand it, the reason people talk so loudly on cell phones is that unlike landlines, your voice is not played back through the receiver. This causes people to overcompensate for what is ironically perceived as talking too softly.
Um, excuse me - I’m trying to kill a thread here.
{stomps off, muttering about some people’s children…}
That’s right. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do this with a cell phone. Otherwise they would have done it. I’m sure.
Here’s something else that’s annoying about cell phones. Ostensibly, people carry them so they can be more accessible to others. I don’t have one because I don’t want to be so easy to reach, but everyone I know who has one says they have it so they can be contacted when necessary… but it never works that way. All the time, people say they miss calls because they turned their phones off and forgot to turn them on, or the battery ran out, or they don’t get reception, or they can’t use the phone until after 9pm because they are out of minutes. Seems to me that all these problems kind of defeat the purpose of having a portable personal phone in the first place.
That’s part of it. Dudes do speak louder on the cell.
Next- well frankly dudes- if you are going to carry on a private conversation in public- for gods sakes dude- let me hear both sides of it, at least! 
Why is it impossible?
I was rear-ended a few weeks ago by a woman who was too busy chatting on her cell phone to notice that I’d stopped at a traffic light. She continued her conversation while we examined the damage to my car. :rolleyes:
“Yeah, that’s right - I just hit someone! {Hahahaha}Yeah, I know, I’m such a ditz. So, when are you and Howard coming over? Do you want to bring…”
What I don’t get are the new walkie-talkie bleeping phones. Just when I thought cell use had become basically tolerable and respectable again, out come these phones which combine a staticy speakerphone with constant walkie-talkie bee-boops. I mean, really. The way they get used reminds me a lot of boomboxes (or the people that turn their stereo system speakers to face out their windows so as to listen to music INSIDE THEIR APARTMENT): the whole point seems to be about displaying status symbols and confronting surrounding society with you and your noisy ass.
Cell tech could be so much better as a social tool, and it’s getting there. The next big moves are:
-truly seamless handsfree systems (like SS mikes but even less obtrusive) that people keep in most all the time.
-true voice activated commands, dialing, etc. or an in-phone computer assistant with a simpler and less obtrusive physical interface
-more IM-like features, allowing you to know what people are “available” and what their network status is at all times, allowing you to contact any number of them at any time (with minimal or no dialtone negotiation depending on someone’s status)
-phone service fee models becoming more like “always-on” internet (which will converge with phones anyway)
All this will radically change how people communicate with anyone they want to talk to being instantly at their fingertips and little cost effect for choosing to talk to anyone for however long you want. Want to talk to Jim? Call his name with the command key pressed, voice rec will connect you to him immediately, and you’ll be able to talk to him without even waiting for a dialtone as long as he’s open to that sort of call. And it’s not very far away.
Imagine a whole generation that is going to grow up with the above as givens: it’ll make the current texting generation look like neanderthals.
I forgot the punchline: think of how fucking annoying THAT will be to us old codgers. Whippersnappers will constantly be talking to totally random people out of the blue, without even lifting or opening a cellphone to distinguish their behavior from communicating with people locally.
Okay, here’s an hypothesis. We tend to think of people talking to themselves, particularly if they are loud and/or vehement, as mentally disturbed and possibly a danger of some kind, and we do this on more or less an instinctive or subconscious level. People on cell phones appear to be talking to themselves. We transfer the aversion or fear we feel towards “mental cases” who talk to themselves to people on self-phones (especially if they’re using a headset). They just look too much like people who hear little voices in their heads. I was in a restaurant with a relative once when I thought the solitary woman at the next table was talking to herself all through her meal. It made me feel creepy and rather annoyed with her, until I realized she was talking on a cellphone and using a head set.
Dang, that was funny 
(sorry, I hope this isn’t too much of a zombie thread, if so MODs feel free to kill at will), but I’m sorry I was unavailable to get back to this thread and see the interesting comments.
Ummm…they only say that when you call
I saw a person driving a vehicle. Her right hand was holding a cell phone to her ear. Her left hand was adjusting her hair. I could only hope her third hand was on the steering wheel.
I have a set of HUGE earphones for the computer. They’re the kind that cover your eat completely; my mother always thinks it’s funny when I have them on.
Mostly, I put them on when she’s on the phone with Grandma, who is pretty deaf. I may not even have the music on, but just be using them as a noise-dampener. They’re not good at all when she’s on the cell with Grandma, though… she yells even louder.
And, even though they both yell so much that I’ve heard both sides of the conversation, once she hangs up she proceeds to tell it to me. Do you guys know if there’s any country where that could be considered grounds for a claim of temporary insanity?
I find mobile phones annoying in public places because:
-Yes, some people talk loud in other contexts, but it is very much more common with mobiles
-You only get to hear half the conversation (you might argue the conversation is none of my business, and this would be true, if it was not conducted loudly), and this is annoying.
-The topic of conversation - or at least the half of it that it conducted loudly in my locality - is nearly always incredibly mundane and pointless (you might argue that I simply shouldn’t pay any attention, and this would be possible, if it was quieter), and this is annoying.
Why is it annoying? I don’t know - it just is; I’m not sure to what extent I can exercise choice over what things will and will not annoy me.
My mother’s cousin is a psychiatrist, and she told me that hands-free cell phones are an actual problem in contemporary psychiatry, as all the people who walk around talking to themselves now see a bunch of other people walking around talking to themselves, so surely there’s nothing strange about that?
I think it’s a combination of the volume and the one-sided conversation triggering your cues that you’re being asked a question and expected to respond. (Sort of like those awful moments when your attention drifts away and suddenly you realize that someone has said something important to you and is expecting your response - especially if that person is a teacher, your boss, etc.)
My husband got yelled at once by someone on the bus, for talking on his cell phone. Yes, he does have a naturally slightly loud voice (it’s baritone and carries quite well, which is part of the issue). However, in his defense, the conversation that this woman was so offended by was quite obviously him learning that his father had colon cancer, and so yeah, he was distressed.