The reason, the manager explained, was that he was getting tired of standing at the counter and waiting to take the orders of customers who were too busy yakking on their cell phones to place them.
A small annoyance, perhaps. But just one more example of cell phone self-centeredness. As if we need one more example.
Don’t get me wrong, I think cell phones are wonderful things. They enable us to keep in touch with friends and families. To summon help in emergencies. To send private photos to strangers.
They allow us to communicate with each other like never before. Although my wife and I had to laugh when we inadvertently wound up in a club filled with young people presumably there to meet other young people and noticed the four 20-somethings at the next table ... all ignoring each other and talking on their cell phones.
What once was a great convenience has turned into a great addiction.
On the West Coast last month, a 39-year-old woman had to be taken off an Amtrak train after other passengers complained that she had been yakking loudly on her cell phone.
For 16 hours. Nonstop.
Which is, I’ll concede, a pretty remarkable achievement, although maybe that’s because my average phone call lasts an average of 16 words.
In her defense, she may not actually have been yakking nonstop. Assuming there was another person on the other end, she may have been listening half that time. And, unless her phone service is a lot better than the one I used to have, there had to be some dropped service during that period.
Still, even if her actual talking time was only an hour or two, a lot of people might say she got off easy and instead of merely being removed from the train she should have been thrown under it.
When she was interviewed by a Portland television station later, the marathon mouth purported to be puzzled by the incident. She felt, she declared, “disrespected.”
To a generation that has come to be believe it’s their Constitutional right to yak whenever and wherever the mood strikes them, her reaction probably is not surprising.
But anyone who’s ever been forced to listen to someone else yak — or to wait for them to hang up and order their deep dish with extra pepperoni — has a right to feel annoyed and irritated.
Maybe even disrespected.
Contact D.L. Stewart at dlstew_2000@yahoo.com.
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