Blogging While Commuting is Next

The Lord of Truth introduces us to a blogger who rants about her commute, a brilliant idea that should have occurred to yours truly. The things I've said in my car, while stuck in traffic... well, let's just say that I'm less polite than usual. As for the Commuterrant blogger, she's not simply limited to blogging about her commute...

Why do people use their cell phones to call others and talk about NOTHING? Before cell phones came along, we didn't call one another to talk about coffee. Or broccoli. We called when we had something important to communicate, or wanted to catch up. We never called someone and said, "Where are you?" because it was pretty clear that the person on the other end of the line was, in fact, in the place where you called him or her. And we never asked, "What are you doing?" because the person we had called was, in fact, talking on the phone - and only talking on the phone - and we knew it. She wasn't driving, eating, on the bus, in the library, in a restaurant, shopping for tampons, or simultaneously doing at least three of those activities while answering the phone.


And why do people talk on their cell phones in decibel levels far above normal conversation? It's as if, when they pick up that phone, they lose all sense of privacy and personal space. I have overheard deeply personal things coming out of mouths that are mere millimeters from my face: I heard all about the unplanned pregnancy, the date with the convicted felon, the heartbreak of psoriasis. But, more often, I have heard people spending precious time talking about the most mundane minutiae of their lives.

I was in line at Starbucks last week and there was a woman behind me, her ever-yammering mouth approximately half-an-inch from the back of my neck. She could not stop calling people, desperate to fill the void during the 5-minute wait. The second one call ended, she started another. It was the usual cell phone soliloquy:

"Where are you? What are you doing?...I'm at Starbucks. I said I'M AT STARBUCKS. Hello? Wait a minute; you're breaking up. Hello? Can you hear me now?" First she talked to her husband about her son. Then she called her son to tell him that she had just talked to his father and that he'd better do his homework. "What are you doing? Where are you? I'm at Starbucks. Do your homework...I said DO YOUR HOMEWORK."

It's her own fault for entering the wretched hive of scum and villiany known as Starbucks. In any case, she should look at it this way -- we're all simply waiting for the day when they prove cell phones cause cancer, at which point many people die and several lawyers get rich. Hey, I'm just trying to make her feel better.