I had a near death experience the other day in the mall parking lot ... not my first choice for places I'd like to die, so thankfully, I didn't. But it was all the fault of some woman in a BMW with a cell phone attached to her frosted blonde head. She just inched out into my lane, looking to the right, not seeing that if I had been distracted too, I could have pummelled right into the middle of her posh little car.
Now what was so important that she had to jump on the phone and try to navigate the complicated, busy, Christmastime mall parking lot with one hand on the steering wheel. Couldn't it have waited? Couldn't she have called while still parked in a stationary, harmless position?
Next time your driving behind some schmuck who is gliding all the way over to the right perimeter of his lane and then jerks back to the center only to slowly drift to the meridian and jerk back again, don't assume he's drunk. He's probably on his cell phone, lost in conversation with one hand on the wheel and glazed eyes starring ahead, but not really looking at the road. (9 out of 10 times when i have observed this behavior in drivers they have been on cell phones; the 10th time was one of those old ladies that couldn't see over the steering wheel).
And it's not just motorists that are a danger. I've actually been walked into by some guy walking around in the mall talking on a cell phone.
Cell phones just recently distracted me in my 7 am trigonomentry final. Two questions for this person: Is it that vital to your social life that your phone can't be turned off for a 2 hour final? And who needs to call you at 7 am? Is it that important that I loose my fragile train of thought?
Seeing legions of 12 year olds sporting mommy and daddy's cell phones in their pink leopard cases just sickens me. Middle schooler's no longer pass intricatly folded binder paper notes about their crushes to their friends, they just ring them up afterschool at the mall. While I own a cell phone and have used it occasionally to call AAA, tell my family where I am, and other important instances, I still long for a day when communication wasn't so instant. All these wasted words, gossip, and gibberish bouncing off of satelites is depersonalizing. It's become so easy to communicate we say things just because there's a cell phone near. But did that woman in the mall parking lot really have to tell her husband she was coming home for dinner? Do all those guys need to be bugaboos and ring up their girls to tell them about the new Lugz they got?
I heard a fact that if cell phones were made of vacuum tubes, they would be the size of the Empire State Building. Sometimes I wish the transistor was never invented.