Cell Phone Etiquette

I have been in the cell phone age sense it began. I have seen it go from the brick to a credit card size. It has made such a huge impact in the 21 years that I have been seriously watching it, the trouble is that people have no etiquette. So I sat down and wrote a few of my own rules that I try to live by. These are things that irritate me about others or just plain down right make me mad and afraid for them CELL PHONES ARE AN IN YOUR FACE STATEMENT -is that what you are using it for. My cell phone etiquette rules. 1. I don't do--Driving or texting, or calling and talking. Not concentrating on what is really happening. I see people do this and they are all over the road, swerving and going to slow or too fast. GET OFF THE PHONE. I have known people who got in accidents and the people on the other end of the phone has to live with the pain of knowing they were involved, WOULD YOU want to involve others in your accident? YOU'RE A MURDERER WAITING TO KILL. 2. Cell Yell is not necessary, I don't need to do this. I can hear you and you can hear me but they (the people around us) don't have to hear us. Speak normal and MOVE away. Small places echo and the world is not all yours. Others don’t care if you have a cell phone and a call. Your call is NOT important to me! 3. I take my call away from the group I am with, away from table, out of room, etc. they don’t need to hear me talk, My conversation is my conversation. This is true with texting also. It's irritating and distracting, disrespectful to the people you are with. Pay attention to your company and if you are company then pay attention to your host or hostess. 4. And I don’t assume when I am with someone that they understand that I need to talk to the person calling right now, or text this person right now. If I know I am getting an important call that I will need to take or make when I am meeting someone, I explain ahead of the time them. When it comes I make it as short as possible. Every little call or text you get is not vitally important. Callers will wait. Text messages can wait also. 5. I find it is rude to take a call from your buddy, husband, wife, to just chat while you are having dinner at my house or we are out to dinner. You are visiting because you wanted to spend time with me, be polite and spend time with me. I could be doing something else if that is how you feel so don't waste my time. You may just be wasting my time to just chat with someone that could wait. also. Texting and talking are rude and show how you feel about the people you are around. When you do it in front of me I feel discounted. 6. AGAIN I SAY, Don't call anyone while you are driving. You can’t concentrate. I don't want to be involved in a wreck you may have. That I should have to be a part of it.. Hear it! What if you died I would have to remember that moment forever. Give me an option if you call while driving tell me so and let me decide if I want to stay on the line. 7. Don't call me from your car, I don't want to be a way of you wasting your time, while you are waiting for your husband, wife, son, boss or a meeting to start, unless you have time to talk and just not wasting it. We get into a good conversation and all of the sudden you so OH gotta go blah blah blah....If you don't have time to talk don't call. I am not your distraction and I may be doing something else. 8. When checking out at the store hang up pay attention to the cashier, be polite, they are working it is hard to deal with someone who is not paying attention and it is rude. 9. Don't call someone while you are filling your gas tank checking out at a mini market, or setting at a light. You cannot concentrate and you are just killing time mostly mine. Be polite and call from home when you have the time to concentrate and give the person you are calling complete attention. 10. Be polite around others when using your cell phone., standing in line at a store and talking loudly in line in someone’s ear is impolite. 11. I just don't take my cell phone everywhere I go, those calls can wait and I like to spend time with out it and with you. I love you and thank you for being a part of my life. Everyone has a cell phone today. So it is no big deal you don't have to be an in your face user. And because there is so much cell phone use it is getting to be very important to have polite etiquette in dealing with them. Yours and others. LIFE HAPPENS WHILE YOU ARE ON YOUR CELL PHONE. By LaVerne Klancee Dexter-Call Today, we ban smoking in all but designated areas. Currently, cell phone users enjoy the same privileges smokers once enjoyed, but there is no reason we cannot reverse the trend, let CELL PHONE BE A TOOL TO USE NOT ABUSE. copied from website Jacqueline Whitmore of the Protocol School of Palm Beach advise companies such as Sprint about how to encourage better behavior in their subscribers. Whitmore is relentlessly positive: “Wireless technology is booming so quickly and wireless phones have become so popular, the rules on wireless etiquette are still evolving,” she notes on her website. She cites hopeful statistics culled from public opinion surveys that say “98 percent of Americans say they move away from others when talking on a wireless phone in public” and “the vast majority (86 percent) say they ‘never’ or ‘rarely’ speak on wireless phones while conducting an entire public transaction with someone else such as a sales clerk or bank teller.” If you are wondering where these examples of wireless rectitude reside, you might find them in the land of wishful thinking. There appears to be a rather large disconnect between people’s actual behavior and their reports of their behavior. Whitmore is correct to suggest that we are in the midst of a period of adjustment. We still have the memory of the old social rules, which remind us to be courteous towards others, especially in confined environments such as trains and elevators. But it is becoming increasingly clear that cell phone technology itself has disrupted our ability to insist on the enforcement of social rules. Etiquette experts urge us to adjust—be polite, don’t return boorish behavior with boorish behavior, set a standard of probity in your own use of cell phones. But in doing so these experts tacitly concede that every conversation is important, and that we need only learn how and when to have them. This elides an older rule: when a conversation takes place in public, its merit must be judged in part by the standards of the other participants in the social situation. By relying solely on self-discipline and public education (or that ubiquitous modern state of “awareness”), the etiquette experts have given us a doomed manual. Human nature being what it is, individuals will spend more time rationalizing their own need to make cell phone calls than thinking about how that need might affect others. Worse, the etiquette experts offer diversions rather than standards, encouraging alternatives to calling that nevertheless still succeed in removing people from the social space. “Use text messaging,” is number 7 on Whitmore’s Ten Tips for the Cell Phone Savvy.These attempts at etiquette training also evade another reality: the decline of accepted standards for social behavior. In each of us lurks the possibility of a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like transformation, its trigger the imposition of some arbitrary rule. The problem is that, in the twenty-first century, with the breakdown of hierarchies and manners, all social rules are arbitrary. “I don’t think we have to worry about people being rude intentionally,” Whitmore told Wireless Week. “Most of us simply haven’t come to grips with the new responsibilities wireless technologies demand.” But this seems foolishly optimistic. A psychologist quoted in a story by UPI recently noted the “baffling sense of entitlement” demonstrated by citizens in the wireless world. “They don’t get sheepish when shushed,” he marveled. “You’re the rude one.” And contra Ms. Whitmore, there is intention at work in this behavior, even if it is not intentional rudeness. It is the intentional removal of oneself from the social situation in public space. This removal, as sociologists have long shown, is something more serious than a mere manners lapse. A psychologist quoted in a story by UPI recently noted the “baffling sense of entitlement” demonstrated by citizens in the wireless world. “They don’t get sheepish when shushed,” he marveled. “You’re the rude one.”