Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (11 page)

Although
any
publicly made cell call is annoying, no matter what the volume, approaching somebody with a request
merely to talk more quietly
is probably the most effective approach, both because giving strangers orders tends to end badly and because it’s impossible to briefly communicate the greater annoyance of one-sided versus two-sided conversations to somebody heehawing into their phone. By asking them to cut the decibel level, you’re still communicating the essential point: Their cellular overshare is not flying with their captive audience. If they don’t look armed or insane, feel free to lay the science on them (à la “You probably didn’t know this…”) after they detach their big donkey lips from their phone.

Pavlov’s ring tone: Who’s the boss of you, you or your phone?

A cell phone is not a bomb. It will not explode and take your arm off if left unanswered. Yet, not only will many answer business calls on the airport rent-a-car shuttle but if a phone rings at a wedding, a funeral, in the middle of a Broadway play,
¹³
or during sex, there’s a pretty good chance the person it belongs to will pick up.

To understand why, follow the trail of doggy drool back to 1890s Russia, to physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s famous experiment on conditioned reflexes—learned responses that happen automatically, absent critical thinking. Pavlov would put out bowls of food for his dogs and then ring a bell. Before long, all he had to do was ring the bell and the dogs would salivate.

These days, the drooling animals are two-legged, the bell is the ring tone, and the toll is on the rest of us, thanks to how the cell phone has become the adult pacifier of choice. For some grocery shoppers, it’s just too much to bear to walk the ENTIRE beverages aisle while alone with their thoughts. Others are incapable of buying a couple of apples or a jar of peanut butter without a heated phone consultation. Yes, much like an air traffic controller talking an eight-year-old through landing a plane, it is now possible to have one’s spouse supervise every inch of one’s shopping experience
¹⁴
(and never mind how other shoppers feel about being forced to hear a loud recitation of the names of twenty-nine kinds of salad dressing). The worst is when you’re trapped behind some cellboor in the checkout line. Wouldn’t it be nice if they’d turn around and ask the rest of us, “Hey, anybody mind being bored shitless about my friend’s asinine problem with her boss?”

Those who absolutely must take a call in public could at least slink off to an out-of-the-way corner and whisper—and the more they get guff from the rest of us about streaming their loud, dull lives into our brains the more likely they’ll be to do that. And let’s get real: Most “emergency” calls are anything but—unless we’ve redefined “emergency” to mean “whatever doesn’t inconvenience me in the slightest.”
¹⁵

Muzzling the mobile savage: My usual approach.

Unfortunately, interior design for businesses has yet to catch up to cell phone innovation. Businesses provide little closets for their customers so they can leave their human waste without an audience. It would be nice if they’d also provide other little closets (these used to be called phone booths) so their customers could make their calls without polluting everybody else’s attention. (Please put in a request for this ambience improver at your favorite eating establishments.)

At my favorite coffeehouse (which has
NO CELL PHONES
signs posted), some of the employees and many of the other customers have come to depend on me for enforcement when anybody there gets or makes a call.
¹⁶
When somebody is glaringly rude, marching into this serene place while barking into their phone, I long to tackle them, stuff dirty tube socks in their mouth, and bounce on them until they beg for air. (I never said I had mature impulses; I just try to avoid giving in to them.) But, along the lines of what I write in the “Communicating” chapter about direct criticisms just making people defensive, an approach to a cellboor that’s at all aggressive usually just makes them aggressively rude (or, rather,
more
aggressively rude than they already were in forcing a play-by-play of their weekend errands on a bunch of strangers).

The truth is, most of the people who get on their phones at this café aren’t rule-flouting cellboors; they simply aren’t mindful. (This is probably true of many people on phones in many places, with or without
NO CELL PHONES
signs.) So, the tack I find most productive is to smile a little, crouch down at their table level to keep from coming off “alpha,” and stage whisper, “Excuse me, but they have a ‘no cell phones’ policy here. They like that people take their calls outside.” Most just say “I’m sorry; I didn’t know” and scurry outdoors.

In establishments lacking a cell phone ban, again, a request that somebody on their phone merely talk more quietly is actually the best way to get them to end their call or take it outdoors. This communicates that those around them are bothered—the essential detail. But merely asking the person to keep it down a bit suggests that you assume that they have good manners and a sense of consideration for others and inadvertently forgot to exercise them. Telling people what to do, on the other hand, tends to turn them into defiant six-year-olds who want nothing more than to do—louder, longer, and harder—whatever it is you’re telling them they need to stop.

Two scolds are better than one: Enlisting the power of peer pressure.

You may have graduated from junior high school, but in a lot of ways, none of us ever gets out. Thanks to our evolved concern for protecting our reputation, we can still succumb to peer pressure, even as adults, and even when the peers putting on the pressure are strangers to us.

This works in our favor when there’s some cell-blathering socio-turd in the DMV line who refuses to get off her phone. Don’t just keep telling her
you’re
bothered; round up some reinforcements. Even if you enlist just one other annoyed person and even if they just mutter “Yeah, I was bothered, too,” the most amazing thing usually happens: A woman who belligerently insisted that nothing short of a nuclear attack would end her call suddenly finds reason to cut it short. Sure, she’ll probably turn around periodically and give you dirty looks. Fortunately, those don’t come with a soundtrack.

Other ways to stop cellular rudewads

• When a person on a phone is multitasking deep into your eyes

As I wrote in my advice column, answering the phone while at a restaurant with a date is the digital version of deserting your dining companion and bopping over to sit with friends across the restaurant. Texting? In old-school terms, it’s like whipping out a pen and legal pad and saying to your date, “You busy yourself with that pork chop, sweetcheeks. Got a couple letters I gotta mail out first thing.”

When your dining companion gets on the phone or starts texting, don’t just sit there pretending to examine your napkin for hidden messages. Allowing disrespect tells people you’re okay with it. If the person’s a friend, put your foot down: You’re not going to share their attention with the sports scores (and that goes for any covert peeks, as well). On a date, if there aren’t understandable extenuating circumstances for the interruption, you’re within your rights to excuse yourself to the bathroom and crawl out through the window. At the very least, strongly consider making it your last date with them. Their flagrant lack of consideration doesn’t bode well for a relationship, nor does any flagrant lack of response from you. In short, you get what you put up with. As I noted in that column, “if you’re going to invite somebody to dinner and ignore them, at least have the decency to get married first and build up years of bitterness and resentment.”

• When you discover you’ve spent $12 or more for tickets to Raging Bullshit

At the movies, it’s tempting to lean over and say something to the cellboors diverting your attention from the movie with their call or the glow of their phone while they text or check their e-mail, but it’s usually futile. It’s rare that somebody’s doing this because they just aren’t mindful. They usually know they’re being rude, and they don’t care. Go get an usher to stop them—somebody with the power to throw them out.

Some theaters are more proactive than others in evicting cellboors. Let’s all thank them and beg others to hop on their bandwagon. The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, is one of these theaters, starting their movies with a message warning patrons that they don’t “tolerate people that talk or text in the theater” and that when somebody doesn’t follow the rules, they do, “in fact, kick their asses out.”

Some of their moviegoers must think they’re bluffing. Here’s an excerpt from an awesomely irate voicemail (with fabulously fractured phonetics) that a woman left for the Alamo Drafthouse staff, who turned it into a YouTube video:

So EXCUSE ME for using MY phone in USA MAGNITED STATES OF AMERICA! where yer-you are FREE to TEXT in a THE-A-TER!…

I’ve texted in ALL the other theaters in Austin, and no one ever gave a fuck.… I will never be comin’ back to your “Alamo Drafthouse” or whatever.… I’m gonna tell EVERYONE about how SHITTY you are.… Thanks for takin’ my money, ASSHOLE!

The Alamo Drafthouse, in text on-screen in the video, replied:

You’re welcome! Thanks for not coming back to the Alamo, texter!

• Cell phone rehab for co-workers

After I did a presentation at a TV network, two of the younger producers took me aside, asking how they could deal with co-workers who were only partially present in meetings because they were texting, emailing, and Facebooking from their phones. The worst offender was an executive who apparently thought she got a manners waiver with the title of VP. She would consistently miss things said in presentations and cause problems because of it. Well, you can’t single out your boss, but you can suggest a “productivity-increasing idea” to some higher-up: At the start of the meeting, everybody puts their phone in a basket in the middle of the table. This policy not only makes for more polite and productive meetings but also sends a helpful message: No, bosslady, you actually aren’t earning a six-figure salary for checking
cakewrecks.com
multiple times daily.

• Cell phone jammers: Reach out and block someone.

I’ve probably had 300 people gleefully e-mail me to inform me about these electronic gizmos, illegal in the United States, that transmit a radio frequency that blocks cell phone signals, cutting off calls. Yes, I’ve heard of them—and I’m opposed to them. I’m all for boor-silencing, but some people do need to be reachable and aren’t rude, and it isn’t fair to blot out their signal just because other people are cell-bellowing swine. (Taken to the extreme, it’s like sending everybody on a bus to jail because one person on it robbed a bank.) Besides, it turns out that cell phone signals might not be the only ones that are blocked. When Philly’s NBC affiliate reported on a guy using a jammer on his daily bus ride, Drexel University criminal justice professor Rob D’Ovidio told them that jammers may also cut off GPS, two-way police radios, and 911 calls.

Focus pocus: Why be in one place at once if you can be in two?

LA public radio doyenne Patt Morrison had me on her show to talk about “distracted walkers”—those so engaged in texting or phoning that they aren’t paying attention to their immediate environment. This oblivious walking is, of course, bad—if they’re so immersed in their little screen they stroll out into traffic or stop short on the subway steps at rush hour. Yet there are people who get enraged at the mere sight of another person on a cell phone, even if that person is talking outside or is texting and isn’t bothering or impeding anyone. To these cellhaters, even discreet, noninvasive cell phone use is a sign of our civilization’s slow suicide (along with food items that are deep-fried that shouldn’t be and reality shows about New Jersey housewives and the apparently endless supply of Kardashians).

One of these horrified people, “Merle from Woodland Hills,” called in to Patt’s show. She compared those staring into their cell phones to the pod people from
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, proclaimed it “antisocial to behave that way in public,” and added that she feels sorry for the cellphoners because “they’re missing out on their environment.” Her time was up before she could accuse them of mass murder and not wiping the toilet seat after they go.

Merle apparently takes for granted that one should always be “present” and be “in the moment”—meaning in the environment that one is physically in. But, who’s to say that the environment people are physically occupying is the most important environment for them—or should be? As I pointed out on the radio, maybe some of these people Merle objects to aren’t “antisocial” but “multisocial.” (Of course, seeing this as a good thing assumes they aren’t harassing others in earshot with their call.) Say you’re on the West Coast and the person you love is on the East Coast. A hundred and fifty years ago, communicating with them would have meant handing a letter to a guy on a horse and waiting a month or two for a reply. These days, I can be in Los Angeles on a walk exploding with gorgeous flowering trees and vines while I’m on the phone with my boyfriend who’s driving down some bleak street in Detroit, where he travels for his work. Sure, I could stop and smell the flowers—but sometimes I’d rather walk past them and focus on telling him how much I love him so I can make him promise to lock his car doors so he won’t get jacked.