“Guys freak out when you do things like that…”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do about Daddy…”
“I just needed to show the clerk his credit card to check in, you know, I wasn’t going to use it…”
“Maybe she’s threatening to quit to try to get leverage…”
“The doctor says it would be okay, but he still says he doesn’t feel up to it…”
These are not conversations I have been involved in. They are just a random sampling of the things I hear all day long as people stroll around the store with phones attached to their ears.
Some of them actually have the phones attached to their ears. I assume that this is convenient and comfortable, but it makes the users look not merely like Star Trek fans, but like delusional Star Trek fans, walking around talking to themselves.It also makes it impossible to tell when they are talking to me. They frequently look right at me and hold conversations about things in the store.
“Dinosaur Matching cards,” they say, making eye contact with me, “for ages 4 and up.”
Then it hits me that they are reading the box to someone.
I am not sure what they want me to do, unless it is to stand respectfully waiting until they are actually ready to speak to me, but I ignore these people entirely. I do not want to hear their conversations, and I do not intend to play guessing games. One of them yesterday said “Here!” in the middle of a discussion of what kind of food to have at her party, and probably was talking to me at that moment, but I ignored her anyway. I couldn’t be certain, after all.
However, people often come up to the desk with the things they want to buy, never faltering for a moment in their phone conversations. When it first began, The Empress and I discussed what to do, and decided that it was the equivalent of the customer’s being in a phone booth. We waited till they were off their phones before we greeted them or spoke with them in any way. But now I think 40% of our customers are on the phone at any given time, and many do not relinquish the phone the whole time they are in the store, including checking out. I do not make eye contact with them, since they are having a phone conversation after all, but I give them their total and take their money. I used to try to wait for a break in the conversation, as though they were talking to someone who was present, but now I just say what I have to say and if they don’t hear it, it is their fault. Listening for a stopping point feels like eavesdropping.
“She’s coming to the wedding, but I am not going to speak to her. She did things with my husband that she shouldn’t have done…”
“I’m calling about the job opening?”
“Our credit score turned out to be a lot better than I thought it was going to be…”
I am not sure why this sort of thing seems so much more rude on cell phones.
Girlfriends shopping together often share private information. People have conversations while checking out, or break off in the middle of a conversation with a friend in order to ask about construction paper. Customers tell me the details of their kids’ school problems so I can help them find materials to work on the problems, and those conversations are private. It isn’t that I think the rules of interaction in a store are the same as the rules at a cocktail party.
But it isn’t just me. The coffee house a couple of doors down has signs on the desk: “We will serve you when you finish your phone call.” My book club meets there, the place is perfect for assignations and heart-to-hearts, no one objects to talking, but talking on the cell phone is over the line.
Chanthaboune thinks it is because people on cell phones don’t lower their voices. They blithely shout out the details of their surgery or their affairs, whereas they would moderate their tone if they were talking to someone in the room. It may also be that a lone person speaking gets an automatic “Is she talking to me?” response, and doing that over and over during the day gets tiresome.
Or it may be that we need a new set of rules for interacting with people who keep their phones pressed to their heads at all times.
That’s a fascinating post, and it brings up an aspect of linguistics and communication that I had never thought of before — whether there is a set of cues that would make it possible to tell whether someone looking right at you and talking is talking to you or talking on a cell phone. If there isn’t, I suspect there soon will be, because we need that set. My first suggestion would be the blank look in the speaker’s eyes and the loudness of the speaker’s voice, neither of which is compatible with face-to-face conversation .. but I’m guessing. Validation needed…. Thanks for raising the subject.
we should have new rules. But it is fascinating to be the observer…
We get this all the time in the library. We don’t have a sign like your coffeeshop’s, but it’s getting to the point that we may need one soon. I read an article once that suggested part of the annoyance factor of overhearing a phone conversation is that we only get one side of it and our brains automatically try to fill in the rest…but can’t, which is frustrating. Lynne Truss’s Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or, Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door has a whole chapter on how people on cell phones seem to think they’re in a bubble and people outside the bubble shouldn’t be able to hear them. And you’re right about those Bluetooth headsets; somebody talking animatedly to himself used to be a pretty reliable sign of craziness, but now you can’t immediately tell if it’s that or if he’s just been assimilated by the Borg.
So many people now semi-permanently attached to cellphones or to Ipods and their equivalents. At least the kids mainly just txt on their phones – it doesn’t seem quite so much like bad manners as the type of behaviour that you are describing. (I’m assuming those cellphoning in your shop are mostly fully grown adults rather than teens and pre-teens) I can add cellphoning and ipodding to the list of bad-mannered-behaviours-that really-annoy-me that includes talking to people while leaving sunglasses on. On a slightly more serious vein I find it worrying that so many people are tuning themselves out of their immediate physical surroundings. Our ability to divide our attention is very limited and people are putting themselves at risk by focusing on phone calls or music instead of their immediate environmnent (especially so at night when you need your ears availabe to fully monitor your environment)
here’s my theory on cellphones: http://tinyurl.com/tuy2a
ERGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have decided that it so much more rude when you hear the snippets of conversation via cell phones because the individual has involved you in something you don’t want to be a part of. Especially, when they are usually shouting at the top of their lungs. 😉
RYC: lets try again…..(the link above works for me)….. it’s january 7, 2006 on my blog
http://www.xanga.com/private/yourhome.aspx?user=rachelsent&nextdate=1%2f7%2f2006+23%3a59%3a59.999
or: http://tinyurl.com/yndf4g
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