Mobile Manners in the Cell Phone Age

I was at the pharmacy recently picking up a prescription, and noticed a sign taped to the counter asking customers to please refrain from using their cell phones while paying for their medicines. The sign got me thinking about cell phone etiquette—or, too often it seems, the lack thereof.

 

One of my personal pet peeves is when a person either starts or continues a cell phone conversation while going through the check-out at a store. Not only does this potentially slow things down for other people in line (since research has shown that multitasking when talking on the phone is not very efficient), but it also must be awfully frustrating for the cashier who may have to verbally convey information to a distracted or inattentive customer.

 

So, I was pleased to see that my pharmacy was confronting people with the fact that it expects customers to pay full attention to the task of making their purchases. But, the more I thought about it, I found myself growing sad that it had come to this—a store having to say, in effect, “We insist that you be polite.” Whatever happened to good, old-fashioned manners?

 

If you Google the term “cell phone etiquette,” you’ll get thousands upon thousands of results (I performed the search just this morning and got 4,510,000 hits.) Clearly, I’m not the only person who thinks that people tend to behave in very impolite ways too often when using their cell phones.

 

Yet, all of the many guides to Dos and Don’ts when talking on a cell phone won’t do much good if people aren’t willing to do the polite thing. As Joanna Krotz writes in a Microsoft Small Business Center article, “Technology and its myriad benefits are not the issue. People are.”

 

In my opinion, cell phone etiquette really boils down to common sense. If I think of a phone conversation as being equivalent to an in-person conversation, the appropriate manners appear self-evident. If I’m talking to someone and another person walks into the room, he or she will wait until a pause in the conversation to interject. In most cases, I won’t feel obligated to stop talking mid-stream to address the newcomer.

 

Yet, when the phone rings, I—like so many others—feel this strange, urgent need to drop everything and answer it. “Oh, oh, oh, the phone is ringing. I must pick up!” Sometimes this is true when my phone rings at home, but it’s virtually always true when the cell goes off. What is it about a portable communications device that demands so much attention?

 

Like many of your out there, I live a busy, often hectic life. Often multitasking is the only way to get everything done. But whenever I see a person talking on the cell phone while going through a check out, it reminds me to slow down temporarily and focus solely on the present moment.

 

Perhaps I’ll regret asking the question, but here goes: what’s your favorite pet peeve about people’s behavior with their cell phones?

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