Perhaps I need to go here and print out some of these:
May 23, 2008
Damn cell phone users
Yesterday, my friend Mary and I were forced to listen to an amazingly loud woman talk on her cell phone. Loud enough that it drove us outside. Loud enough that I wanted very much to say something to her. Unbelievably loud and unbelievably inconsiderate.
Perhaps I need to go here and print out some of these:
Perhaps I need to go here and print out some of these:
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12 comments:
The elevators in the Denver World Trade Center have TVs that run Captivate Network programming, and they posted a statistic yesterday that 74% of Americans want the use of cell phones banned on airplanes. They didn't say who did the survey, but I wouldn't be surprised if you found equal numbers favoring bans in restaurants and on public transportation.
Interesting number. It would be curious to see how people see others on the cell phone v. themselves. Some of the noisier may be annoyed with others. :)
OK, I've posted the same comments twice thus far, each time to see them disappear into the ether. They were serious and contained the solution to all our problems.
But now I've lost interest in retyping them, and so instead I'll offer a few links to the genius "That Phone Guy." Start with these two videos, but watch them all if you can.
http://tinyurl.com/5kthyg
and
http://tinyurl.com/6dw8wt (this one NSFW language)
All at www.thatphoneguy.com
It would be curious to see how people see others on the cell phone v. themselves. Some of the noisier may be annoyed with others. :)
I wonder the same thing. I doubt the banning of cell phones would do anything to decrease loud people, as they are probably the same ones that talk loud to the people that are with them in public places.
For the most part, they don't bother me, though occasionally someone will be having a conversation of a 'personal' nature and that is kind of uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable is right. I have learned more about the intricacies of bladder infections in the human female body from overheard cell phone conversations than from family members, or from friends who went to med school.
Leighton, for some reason I had you in California. You in Denver now? Or am I completely off?
Steve, I think we need a public agreement that if someone is speaking too loud on their cell, that others can ask them to talk softer without the person asking being perceived as rude.
I moved to the Denver area in August--better job prospects and cost of living. Prior to that, I had been in the L.A. area for nine years. So no, you're not off. :)
I ran into one situation on the mall shuttle last month where other passengers had to physically move a woman who was blathering on her cell phone and impeding the path of a man in a wheelchair who was attempting to board the bus. The driver and other passengers yelling at her wasn't enough to get her attention. Great fun all around.
You know, a solution to the loud cellphone user problem could be simple (or not, depending on the engineering): The reason people speak so loudly while talking on a cellphone is that, unlike regular phones, cellphones do not offer any monitor/feedback of the speaker's voice into the ear. If the industry could make a slight adjustment to allow for this, I think the volume in public would go down. But I'm not sure if it's possible or not. Perhaps someone else can chime in here.
Interesting, Anglican. I never thought of it that way. I always thought it was that the microphone appears much further away than traditional phones and so people assume they have to speak up.
Leighton, I grew up in Colorado and remember 10 years or so driving through the western part and seeing signs that said, "Don't Californiacate Colorado." I guess they meant you. :)
Oregon does that too. I think California has proportionally as many people emigrating as any other state, but it's just so freaking populous that normal migrations seem like floods to people on the receiving ends. Though I guess white flight from SoCal might be a contributing factor as well.
Every cell phone I've owned has had a speaker volume setting that users can control, so it's not just a question of making phones louder. I suspect the real issue is that when people talk on land lines, they're not simultaneously tuning out traffic and the hubbub of a crowd and other people's conversations. Most people determine their favorite cell phone volume when they're indoors in a relatively quiet environment. When they're on cell phones outdoors and the person on the other end is effectively using her inside voice, it's a natural reflex to yell to compensate for the noise--in face-to-face conversations it's a signal to speak up. Not many people remember to turn their cell phone volume up when they go outside, rather than yelling.
In theory, it should be possible to compensate for this electronically, but you would have to come up with a chip smart enough to determine the proper speaker volume in such a way that it wouldn't (a) go up and down unpredictably in the typical up-and-down decibel pattern of crowds, which would make it harder for the audio cortex to follow the conversation (our brains do better tracking a signal when its volume is constant); or (b) deafen you indoors when your cube neighbors laugh unexpectedly. It's a very complicated and probably a very expensive AI problem that hasn't been substantially approached yet, to my knowledge.
Earpieces that fit inside the ear solve the problem by filtering out almost all sound that isn't part of the phone call, but that's another thing you'd have to convince users to do when it's so much less time-consuming to just poke a button and start yammering.
Oh, I misread and missed the feedback part. That might be nontrivial; I'm not sure what the mechanics are in regular phones.
I think we need a public agreement that if someone is speaking too loud on their cell, that others can ask them to talk softer without the person asking being perceived as rude.
Agreed. If someone said this to me, I would try to be more quiet. I still think that most of the worst offenders probably don't care what they do. They are likely rude in other ways.
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