Silence Your Phone

We’ve all been there, sitting in a movie theater and *buzzzzz* *buzzzz* goes someone’s phone. Followed by the blue glow of a screen allowing you to located the perpetrator. Who is it usually?

Did you say teenager?

Yeah that’s usually my experience. It’s sad that at movie theaters, churches and graduation ceremonies they have to request that people silence their phones. But it’s our society today apparently.

The other day I was at a professional event.

You expect to see phones when you’re in a room full of people who are paid to communicate, but I was distracted close to the beginning of the event by a man who was slouched in his seat playing on his iPhone.

Then, he started taking pictures of the speaker… and emailing them. I know this not because I was sitting there staring at him, but because the sound on his phone was on. Cue shutter sound *click* then the *swish* of an email being sent. Then *ding* the sound of email being received.

I think he was sending the photos to himself. This continued throughout the presentation.

How old do you think this man was?

I judged the suit-clad disruptor to be in his mid-sixties. About the age of the typical person complaining about cellphone use during presentations.

…. and I was worried that people would judge me for my OmniPod beeping (no one noticed).

Maybe there’s still a lot of student in me, but I keep my phone on vibrate sitting on my desk. That way I’ll know if I get a call but won’t disrupt those around me (although I’m fairly certain that since my office is tucked in the back corner of our floor, no one would hear it anyway). We were trained as students to keep our phones silent in class and during important events.

Now I probably sound like a cranky old man. So yeah…

Get off my lawn!

3 thoughts on “Silence Your Phone

  1. I never want to be the one whose phone goes off after the “please silence your cell phones” announcement! Taking pictures & emailing them is one thing. But dude, there is a silent option! Some people are just oblivious I guess.

  2. I hate it when people don’t silence their phones! We have a number of people in our office who don’t, and their ring tones are quite obnoxious.

    Aside from that I sat behind someone in a meeting who blatantly had his phone out on the table, surfing the net, timing our boss (who had promised to make it under an hour), checking his personal email, etc etc. Then he said something about how he “didn’t want people to get the wrong impression” of him when he was out of the office when they were looking for him one day. Too late.

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