I’m super excited to have been invited to join a blog group alongside three talented bloggers. Each week, one of us chooses a topic and we all post a blog entry on that topic, usually on Thursdays.
Here are the links to the other fabulous blogs:
This week’s topic comes from Moma Rock, who said: Some airlines allow it. Other’s don’t. What’s your take on airlines allowing cell phone usage while in-flight? Are you for it, or against it?
My
answer is simple: Cell phone usage
should not be allowed on airplanes.
Period.
The
reasoning behind my answer rings slightly more complicated. I am actually okay with people texting
on their cell phones on a plane, or checking email or playing a game or
whatever non-talking-out-loud options their phones offer. The problem arises when people begin to
use those phones as originally intended – as phones, objects into which they
speak. With that, I am so not okay.
I
blame it on Therapy Woman.
I’ve
mentioned before that one of my kids has special needs, and those needs require
twice-per-week therapy. The
sessions happen at a pediatric therapy center in a suburb just west of
ours: an hour on Tuesdays; 45
minutes on Thursdays. While she
works with her therapists, I sit in the narrow, crowded waiting room with an
assortment of other special parents.
The room is stuffed with chairs, and those chairs are stuffed with
people, most of whom are tired or stressed, all of whom would rather be
somewhere else. Many read or text
or check Facebook on iPads or phones; others work on laptops or occupy their
children.
But
not Therapy Woman. No, Therapy Woman
talks. On her phone. Constantly. Incessantly.
LOUDLY.
Over
the past months, I’ve heard a variety of Therapy Woman’s phone
conversations. I’ve heard
highlights, low lights, the mundane.
I’ve heard her negotiate a house sale, order Mexican take-out, check on
her mother. I’ve heard her argue
with a kitchen designer, complain about the shortage of parking in the therapy
center lot, order Italian take-out.
I’ve heard her and I’ve heard her and I’ve heard her. I’ve put in my headphones and listened
to my iPod and, yet, still, I heard her.
One
week, I bumped into Therapy Woman in the upstairs vestibule instead of in the
waiting room. She was, of course,
on the phone, either brokering world peace or ordering Thai – who can remember? Later, I passed her again on my way
out. I caught a snippet of her
conversation (how could I not?).
She was complaining that someone in the waiting room had been really
rude and – gasp! – had shushed her as
she tried to talk on the phone. The nerve! she cried. What
was the world coming to? I
left her roiling in her haze of righteous indignation and walked to my car,
shaking my head. The nerve, indeed.
Therapy
Woman was right: someone in the
waiting room had been rude. But it hadn’t been the man who bravely (and
thankfully) shushed her. It had
been her, of course. In all the
weeks I’d been near her, including that day, she gave absolutely no thought to
how her loud, public conversations might be unwelcome in the small space she
shared with a dozen other people. She
apparently held no clue that she spoke much, much too loudly for her
surroundings or that, sometimes, she spoke of topics that were not appropriate
for an audience.
Therapy
Woman is why I want a bright-line “no phone” rule on airplanes. Plane travel is stressful enough: small spaces, jam-packed carry-ons,
testy airline personnel. Planes
are replete with passengers clutching bags of McDonalds or bottles of nail
polish or pairs of toenail clippers, which they then eat or uncap or snap open
(and use!) in flight. Throw in
rows and rows of Therapy Women scolding car mechanics or yelling at husbands or
ordering pizza and inevitably this mode of travel will progress from merely stressful
to largely unbearable.
Although
Moma Rock’s topic seems simple, it implicates a much bigger issue. It asks us to consider terms of our
shared social contract, elements like manners, respect, and common courtesy. These basic tenets too often seem dead,
or at least mortally wounded. These
days, it seems that when people are given an inch, they take a mile – and then
another and another and another after that. There’s a big “i” screaming out from the middle of “society,”
and individual want now trumps the greater good. Too many people believe social rules of propriety don’t
apply to them; too many people believe they deserve special treatment. And if it isn’t given to them, they simply
take it, oblivious to the cost.
In
law school, we discussed “bright-line” rules – the ones that say something
(say, cell phone usage) is absolutely prohibited, etc. We talked of the “slippery slope,” how
the goal of the law must be clarity, because the gray area always leads to
problems. It’s that slope I
consider when I say that, even though I’m okay with cell phone texting or game
playing on a plane, cell phones must be completely banned. It’s too short a leap from using your
hands to text to using your mouth to talk. I easily imagine people “hiding” cell phones in their hair
or next to their shoulders, trying to make it look as if they are simply
talking to their seatmate, and I imagine the fight that would follow between
the rule breaker and the flight attendant. And I just sigh.
I’ve
had too many doors not held open, too many “thank yous” not answered with
“you’re welcomes,” too many hours listening to Therapy Woman order Kung Pao
chicken to believe that the allowance of cell phones on airplanes will end
well. And, frankly, there’s
something a little wonderful about the idea of being disconnected for a time –
an hour or two or maybe even three or four – without the possibility of a
ringing phone or a binging text, be it mine or something else’s. Maybe I’ll make conversation with the
person in the seat next to me; maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll read or nap or look out the tiny window at the
clouds. Or maybe I’ll just sit,
silently, enjoying the whoosh of the
airplane engines as they carry me far away from Therapy Woman and everything
she represents.
