I don't have a cell phone. I had one for a couple of months, but decided that I didn't want it. So far, I've been able to live without it. It still amazes me that so many other people can't seem to do the same. Worse still, it seems that most of these people have no common sense or common decency.
Take this past weekend. I went to dinner with my parents at one of the local fish restaurants in the area (not my choice - I hate seafood). We were seated fairly quickly, which is unusual for this place because it's pretty nice and usually pretty busy.
Everything was pretty nice until someone in a nearby booth had to make a phone call on his cell phone (or got one, I'm not really sure about that). Immediately, this once quiet gentleman starts talking loudly. As near as I can tell, it was simply because he was on a cell phone. This is usually the first thing that I find annoying about a lot of cell phone users. They have this need to talk louder. Sometimes it's to speak over a lot of noise, sometimes it's to compensate for a poor connection (the same logic that Howie Mandel says most people use when they are speaking to someone who doesn't understand the language). Most times, I think it's just a status move to make other people around the cell phone user think, "Hey, he's important."
I'm not really sure why he was talking louder. Frankly, I didn't care. I cared more about the fact that he was speaking loud enough for us to hear his side of the conversation clearly. Not just our table, but the table next to us as well. Every word of his work related call was very clear.
Oh, did I mention that this guy was either a coroner or a medical examiner?
You can probably imagine that much of the conversation left us a little less hungry, even before "Quincy, M.E." got to the instruction, "Put 'im in a body bag and freeze him." After that, I really didn't feel like eating my prime rib anymore.
So, remember, if you need to discuss making a Y-incision in a body over your cell phone at a restaurant, please, GO OUTSIDE!
