This post was published to Intel Inside, Idiot Outside at 1:00:17 PM 9/23/2007
Bad boys and their toys
Boys will always be boys and men will always be boys. The success of a boy or a man can be measured by the size of his toys… in this case, the smaller the size the better. Most men I know (including myself) love to be surrounded by gadgets irrespective of whether they have any plausible uses or not. While I can understand this psychology, I cannot fathom the attachment some men (and for that matter women) have with one of the most prevalent toys of the modern world – the mobile phone. While no one can doubt its convenience and utility, can someone please explain the extraordinary attachment some men feel towards it? They have an uncontrollable urge to always leave it on (at the highest ringtone volume possible) and answer it no matter where they are. Unfortunately when this is done in three circumstances it becomes a nuisance to the others around and as luck would have it, I frequently (almost everyday) happen to find myself in one of those three circumstances.
Circumstance 1. While watching a movie or a play.
I love watching movies period. There is no better irritation than to find a shrill ringtone with Himesh Reshamiaya’s (or whatever his name is) nasal outputs suddenly going off somewhere when the hall is in pin drop silence. Worse still, the person actually having the audacity to answer the phone and go whisper whisper whisper in it with the illusion that no one else can hear him. Hey dude… people sitting around you CAN HEAR YOU and yes THEY DO GET DISTURBED. One would think that this is common sense and if you don’t give a damn about your leisure, at least respect the rights of others who have come and paid their hard earned money to watch a flick. If you are one of those who is reading this and who doesn’t think twice while talking on your phone in the middle of a movie, I beg you to please please explain your demented state of mind to me. I am sure you have your own point of view and I would LOVE to hear what kind of point or view that is.
Circumstance 2. In a flight
My job involves lots of travel… sometimes as many as 5-6 flights in a week. Now whoever has travelled by air knows that one has to power off his mobile phone until the plane has landed and the “fasten seat belts” sign is switched off. The explanation given here is that microwave radiation affects aircraft communication and can be a safety hazard… obviously not only for the birdbrained moron using his phone but also for the 100s others in the same flight. While there is no conclusive proof regarding the same, I am not too keen on becoming a guinea pig (even though I may smell like one) and being part of the flight that conclusively proves this point. Damn it, I have to do so many things in my life before I can be a case study on mobile phone radiation (I haven’t even purchased an IPod or slapped Ekta Kapoor yet.). Almost every fifth person switches on his phone as soon as the flight has touched down on the runway without waiting it to come to a complete halt. While I am sure the security risks here are minimal - at the most the pilot may miss-communicate with the Air traffic Controller and park in someone else’s bay and that could actually turn out to be a lot of fun after a weary flight. However I still would like to know what are the over powering feelings that go on in some people’s minds that they can’t even wait for a couple of more minutes before starting to talk on their phones. Hey man, surely your spouse, mistress, driver or whoever your companions are for the night can wait a minute or two more to hear your irresistible voice. In case you are not sure, ask them and most likely their reply may hurt your ego. And then there are the other kinds of boys which I have surprisingly encountered more often in business class who have the audacity to actually continue sms ‘sing while the flight is almost taking off (the most crucial time in a flight). And no, the phones are not in “flight mode”.
Circumstance 3. In a training session
My company is involved in a lot of corporate trainings and I regularly conduct them in most top IT and as well as some of the smaller companies. The big companies have a supposedly very stringent recruitment policy which tries to take in the cream of India’s young talent, while the smaller rungs are left with the so called “non-engineers” and drop outs. Now once again, I would have presumed that it would be common sense for most educated literate adults to keep their phones switched off while their colleagues are trying to learn something. It may so happen that you forget to switch off your phone, but talking on your phone in the middle of a session??? If anyone has a valid explanation for that, I would LOVE to hear it. So apparently it seems that mobile etiquettes are missing in most of these educated, over-paid software developers, project managers and team leaders. Now you must be wondering that the situation would be much much better in the top companies. Surely they recruit the nerds who scored the highest marks and exhibited the most ability to cram irrelevant text, surely they must be having proper guidelines and policies in place to ensure a conducive learning environment for all, surely the guys getting paid 5 figure sums every month would have that much of common sense in them… but with all other things in life, logic does not seem to apply here. It is the smaller companies and their lesser intellectual employees who are so much more well behaved their counterparts. The smaller companies have stringent policies for attending training sessions and ensuring they get the most bang for their buck, the larger companies seem to have completely lost it. People can walk in anytime, walk out anytime, it doesn’t matter whether the person needs the training or not, most don’t even bother to ensure that the attendees match certain pre-requisites needed. Give me a choice between taking up an assignment for a smaller company with just 50-100 employees versus a company with 30,000 employees, and billions of dollars of revenue, I will always prefer the smaller company. The attitude and behavior of these companies and their employees can put their larger counterparts to shame in every regard – punctuality, etiquettes, sincerity, level of intelligence (of course there are exceptions everywhere). The next time you are in a training session, switch off your phone, and if a call is very important, excuse yourself, step out of the class and take it. These are lessons which lesser mortals like me have to teach some of our engineers and MBAs coz unfortunately the education system assumed a certain level of common sense which turned out to be a wrong assumption.
The only explanation for the behavior described above can be one of the following
1. The mobile phone that the individual is using is so ancient it cannot be put in silent mode.
2. The person using the phone is so screwed up that he doesn’t know how to switch off the phone. One word of advice – RTFM (Read the F****** manual)
3. The individual has a rare mental disorder which compulsively forces him to speak on the phone every couple of hours to charge his dead brain cells least they slip into an indefinite coma (not that it would matter much to others around).
4. Maybe the individual did not ever think about the nuisance it might be causing others around, which means he is either totally inconsiderate or totally selfish. People seeking matrimonial alliances with them need to be careful about such qualities.
