Friday, December 12, 2008

Can You Hear Me Now?

I am having trouble understanding something.

What compels people to have private telephone conversations in public restrooms?

I mean really. Who is so important that you cannot 'finish business' before taking their call?

This may only be a male-thing, as I don't make a habit of hanging-out in women's restrooms, but there's a sub-group of men who seem to have no problem talking on their mobile phone while standing at the urinal or spending time on the toilet.

I find that it's extremely rude to the other restroom patrons, and I am embarrassed to audibly use the facilities while the guy next to me is talking to his mother. I don't feel the need to broadcast the sounds of my bodily functions beyond the restroom walls, especially via a stranger's mobile phone.

Are we Pavlovian conditioned to answer a ringing phone regardless of our situation? Why can't we let a ringing phone wait? I have always worked on the belief that if the phone call's that important, the other party will leave a message or call back later.

Based on the one-sided conversations that I had heard, the calls are often business related. I can only imagine being on the other end of the conversation... "Yeah, we can [PHFFFFT!] get that order of [TINKLE... TINKLE...] widgets out to you [FLUSH!] next week."

Gee thanks buddy; you have taken the phrase 'Nice doing business with you' to a whole new level.

2 comments:

  1. And this will continue to get worse.

    Although it isn't a restroom, at a gas station/convenient store recently there stood a "Hoodie" covered late teens-early 20s male pumping gas at the set of pumps behind my car. As he was trying to fill his car, he was also trying to "text" someone on a cellphone and having considerable trouble trying to do both at the same time. I watched with disbelief because I couldn't think of any message so important that he couldn't have waited a few minutes to send.

    To my surprise (or maybe not) down came the window of the car and the young man inside yells out, "I couldn't read your message, did you get my message."

    The gas pumping individual yells out, "I was asking if you needed something from inside the store?"

    This world is going places I don't want to go.

    S J L

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  2. When somebody is on the phone in the men's room you should probably try to be as loud as possible. The potential embarrassment may do more to break that habit than anything you could possibly say to them.

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