06 February 2006

 

10. Speaker-Phone

Occasionally, in the evolution of our human machinery, there arise devices that rear up against us and make our living experience a misery. We are supposed to be enriched by these clever inventions--particularly in our work-a-day lives--but sometimes the signal gets lost on the wrong track when the lights are on but nobody is home.
Have we not all been subjected to the speaker-phone's cacophonous chorus and plaintive beeps and boops? And have we not all been rung up by a colleague only to answer and then hear his distorted and garbled voice shouting back at us through the ear-piece, as if it were trapped inside the Phantom Zone flying through space like the three villains in Superman II? And then, the indignity, to hear his desk chair squeaking, or birds peeping in the oak tree outside his office window, while trying to decipher his squawking treatise on synergistic alliances, or work-flow dimension, or some such. All the while knowing that any number of unknown people are listening to and evaluating this conversation. "Do you mind if I put you on the speaker-phone?" Of course we mind--everybody minds--we all hate it.
We are happy to report that it is not just us who revile the use of this insidious device. It is also officially rude.
Mr. Post ought to know. His great-grandmother wrote the book on manners that he revised, expanded, and adapted for seminars.
We believe the Post family should run further afield, and amend their work on speaker-phone rudeness to include the use of its twisted cousin, the walkie-talkie-cellphone, or, more aptly, the portable speaker-phone.
Both are the impedimenta of a lazy, inconsiderate mind, easily amused by simple technological novelty. Because, in what universe is it sensible to use a telephone to talk to someone on a two-way radio basis? The answer is: possibly in the universe of law enforcement or construction. It is absolutely not in the universe of riding on the subway and telling someone about how you got a parking ticket because you did not see the handicapped parking sign. It is a telephone. Use it as such. Who do you imagine yourself to be, the captain of a mortar emplacement, radioing in firing coordinates?
Devices like speaker-phones and walkie-talkie-cellphones are but de-personalizing tools of convenience. They deaden users to their surroundings and consign the idea of a well-mannered common experience to oblivion. To the Phantom Zone.

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