Before I was a mom, over 30 years ago, I worked out in the business world. I worked for a major bank for many years and then went to work for a smaller company before deciding to stay home and be a mom.
The smaller company I worked for sold/leased pagers. For those of you too young to know, a pager was kind of the predecessor of the cell phone. The only people who really got pagers back then were doctors, some contractors and a few shady characters. Once in a while an expectant dad would come in to rent a pager for a couple of months, so that the expecting mom could let him know when it was “time.”
I did some credit checks, bookkeeping and collections for the company. As with banking, the people you would meet (especially the shady characters) were what made the job interesting and fun.
Back then, none of us “regular people” saw any reason to have a pager. I understood the doctors needing them, of course. They are always on call and have emergencies. I also understood the big contractors who had multiple jobs that could have an emergency during the work day. I wasn’t sure about the shady characters, but knew better than to ask!!
Nowadays, we all have cell phones and are constantly “on call” for anyone from our kids, to our spouses, to friends, to telemarketers.
Now I don’t know about you, but I have come to the conclusion that I am not that important. I don’t need to be accessible 24/7. And most of the people who call me are not in an emergency situation.
I know it is convenient to be able to reach people at any given moment. To know exactly when your spouse will walk in the door from work. To know exactly where your child is every second of the day. To get called to confirm your doctor’s appointment while you are trying on clothes at the mall. To have someone call you from a random company while you are enjoying tea on the veranda with your best friend. To get asked who you plan to vote for while having dinner at the bistro down the street.
WAIT! That got out of hand quickly!
Recently, I have been in situations where I am trying to have a conversation with someone and they are looking at their phone the whole time we are talking. I know you can do two things at once, but you can’t concentrate on two things at once, so either they are not really paying attention to what is on their phone (which means they are just staring at it out of some kind of addiction, not because it is important) or they aren’t really engaged in what we are talking about. Either way, I see a problem!
I remember when “call waiting” became a thing on your land line. (Again, dating myself!) I never got call waiting, because I thought it was the rudest thing ever. Don’t tell me that you had to have it, so your children could get you in an emergency. I know that was the reason lots of my friends got it. And had they asked me to hold on and then come back quickly to say they had an actual emergency, I would have understood and gotten off of the phone immediately.
What happened most of the time was that in mid-sentence, I would be asked to hang on and immediately the phone would go silent. I would wait, and wait, and wait. Then, a perfectly well mannered, Southern lady that I considered a friend would come back on the line giggling to tell me the story another friend on the other line had just told her, while I sat there waiting.
I finally got to where I would hang up whenever someone put me on hold. If they wanted to talk further, they could call me later. And if it was an emergency, they could move on to take care of it. I was tired of being the first person on the line who suddenly got shoved to second while the second caller chatted on and I sat there waiting and waiting. (First World Problems, I know. But that doesn’t make it any less rude.)
So now we have moved from being rude to the people we are talking to on our land lines, to being rude to the people sitting right beside us or across from us at the dinner table. We can tell the person with us to hold on as we chat and laugh on our phones and they can just sit there trying to hold onto whatever thought they were in the middle of when our cell phone rang.
The thing that gets me is no one seems to see this as rude. People I think highly of and who have impeccable manners, will get into a long drawn out conversation on their cell phone, nothing earth shakingly important, just a chat, while I sit uncomfortably in a restaurant wondering where to look, how to not eavesdrop, but not able to help it.
In work situations I have seen people keep glancing at their phone while having a meeting with me, or working on a project. I have tried to pass it off that they are looking at notes about our work, until they have said, “Oh, that was so and so, they said to tell you hi.” “Or that was so and so, I am meeting them after we finish.” Then I know that they were only halfway paying attention to what we were doing.
I tend to leave my cell phone on the kitchen counter or at my desk. I put it in the back seat when I am driving down the road. I usually silence it if I am meeting with anyone or rehearsing or really anything. I don’t like the distraction and I can check it when I finish what I am doing. I know that means that it might be a few minutes before I see your message. It might mean that I call you back after my appointment is over.
Rarely is it an emergency that has to be handled immediately. Never has anyone’s life been in the balanced when I didn’t see a text right away. I am just not that important.
We have all had those times when someone we knew was in a precarious situation and we went on to our lunch date or business meeting anyway. But what would be wrong to say, in those RARE instances, “I am sorry, but I have a possible crisis and I am going to keep my phone where I can see it, but on silent.” Then if a non essential call or text comes through you can glance and move on. If someone who might be involved calls, excuse yourself, step away from the others and handle your business. If it turns out to be about something else unimportant, tell the caller you are in the middle of something and get off the phone and back to the live people who are there in front of you ASAP. If it is about the emergency, everyone was forewarned that it could happen.
I am not asking for too much, I don’t think. Just some common courtesy and some cell phone etiquette. Every situation is different, but it isn’t that difficult to think about what the polite thing to do is and to prioritize things like what call or text is important and what can wait while you finish your lunch, your conversation, the song you are rehearsing or the meeting you are in. At some point you should be able to figure that it might not be all that important to see that text over listening to the person who is actually there with you, trying to connect one on one.
I hope that we can learn to be present in the moment and quit letting all of the noisy technology blind us to what is in front of us and what is truly important.
