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First and foremost, I would like to state: Don't take cel phones on dates. Period. I once dated a guy who took his cel phone along with him on dates. Of course it rang, and he answered it, impeding both our conversation and the success of the relationship (two weeks). I even told him up front that it annoyed me and was inconsiderate, but he blew me off. See above parenthetical note about the brief duration of the relationship. That wasn't the main reason that it ended, but it had a lot to do with it. If someone can't respect his company, he doesn't deserve it in the first place. Then there was another guy who was always on his cel phone. Early on in our relationship, he was over at our house and had to make some phone calls, which he did—from his cel, in our living room. Of course, he's not as quiet as my dad or I, which translates into comparatively obnoxious, as if making calls from someone's house, from a cel phone, without taking the conversation into another room weren't obnoxious enough. After a few minutes, I started to get irritated and embarrassed, and was on the verge of getting up and telling him to go outside when he hung up. I immediately said, "In the future, you're welcome to take your conversations into another room or outside." "Oh," he said, smiling sheepishly. "That wasn't a suggestion, that was a direct order," I said. "Oh." Then I dragged him into the other room and said, "Look, at your house, you can do whatever you want, but this is my house, and you take the phone into another room or outside. . . . Either take it outside or I will throw it outside for you." That concluded the problem, and I vowed never to date anyone that cel phone-obsessed again. To allude to Hook as I did in my first cel phone rant, there was a scene in that film where Peter was wandering around the house with a cel phone the size of a clock radio and shouting into it. His wife hinted, "That is a mobile phone" to try to make him leave the room, but of course it didn't work. If it had been me, that would have been the last straw, and I'd have divorced him on the spot. Actually, no, I'd have divorced him earlier in the film, when he answered the cel phone in the middle of his daughter's school play. Asshole. But then, of course, it would have been a really short movie. I wonder, what's the point of carrying a cel phone if you're never going to answer it anyway? It's worse than when I was going to UT, and my fellow students would sign up for UT email accounts, list them as their official email addresses, and then never check them. It's not like you paid a fee for that email account, but still, a lot of important information got sent to those things. Another thing that I dislike about cel phones is the way people will add shit to them that they really don't need, like taking pictures. Seriously, get yourself a camera. I fear that the mandatory "academic dishonesty" bit that professors always have to add to the syllabus may be longer in the future as a result. I say this because of something that happened when I was taking RTF 341 (Audio Production). As is usually the case with any given class, we had a token slacker who didn't show up the day of the only test we had the entire semester. We finished our tests and handed them in and the instructor (the coolest I ever had, Steve Metze) began grading them. Meanwhile, a friend of said slacker was sitting there with her cel phone, and she took a picture of Steve grading the tests and sent it to her slacker friend with the accompanying voice mail, "Here's a picture of Steve grading the test that you're not taking." Steve paused awkwardly, realized that the picture wasn't actually of the test itself, relaxed a bit, and then made the point I just made about academic dishonesty climbing to new heights. Another former professor of mine named Thomas Schatz was talking about how you now have the ability to watch movies on your cel phones. Or at least, it's getting that way. He was imagining people wandering around campus and bumping into each other because they were so wrapped up in staring at their cel phones. Not that you need a movie on your phone to do that. I will never forget the story I heard of the guy who was talking into his cel phone and not paying attention to where he was going, and as a result, he walked into a tree and somehow managed to break his neck, and he actually died. Okay, so it sucks that he died, but at the same time, that's fucking hilarious. It couldn't happen to a more deserving person. And some people don't believe in Darwin. Speaking of cel phone-induced accidents, a former friend and I were in his van driving out to Reimer's Ranch in northwest Austin to go hiking once when saw a nasty car accident right in front of us. We weren't sure exactly what happened, but it seemed like someone pulled out in front of someone else and got sideswiped. All we noticed was that one second we were driving and the next second slamming on the brakes and swerving into the turning lane to avoid the suddenly-not-moving-cars twenty feet in front of us and glass shards all over the road. After we recovered from the shock, we decided to make a U-turn to see if they were all right. We drove back and looked to see if they needed an ambulance, but they seemed to be fine, except of course one of the guys had the most "Boy, am I ever fucked" look on his face that either of us had ever seen. Anyway, we noticed that one of the guys there was of course babbling away into his cel phone. I said, "He's probably not even calling for help. He's probably finishing up a conversation he was having when he caused the wreck." It's hard to have sympathy for people who drive with an ear in a cel phone. I wish we'd do like in New York and pass a law forcing people to pull over for that. People get into a whole different mind set when they're on a cel phone. I used to work at a Wendy's, and I really hated it when people showed up on their cel phones. They'd either tell me to wait (as if there weren't anyone behind them in line), or they'd stand there and argue with the person on the other end while they were trying to order, resulting in everyone getting confused, or, my personal least favorite, they'd ask the person on the other end what they wanted to eat, and they'd argue back and forth. Seriously, either decide what you want before you send someone out for you or just don't get anything. It's called consideration. I don't get it. Cel phones are like little demons that possess people and turn them into total jackasses. They forget how to walk, talk, and drive while they're on them. What is with you people? Whether it's driving or standing in line, you need wake up and take more notice of the world around you, not the one on your cel phone. If you want to get something to eat, talk to the person behind the cash register, not the one on the other end of the line. The world will not stop if you hang up, I promise. If you want to get to work in one piece, do it with both hands on the wheel and no further distractions than the radio. And if you want to see a movie, go to a movie theatre. Only don't take your phone with you, because I'll be waiting for you, and I'll be only too happy to rip it out of your hand and beat you over the head with it. |