Can You Hear Me Now?

A magazine editor I know described the best thing about skydiving this way: "For a few minutes," he said wistfully, a tone coming into his voice some men use in describing the long-ago summer when they first experienced love, "I knew nobody could get me on the phone." This is why I don't own a cell phone: There are moments when I want to be absolutely inaccessible. In fact, given my general nature and the distrustful relationship between me and the rest of the species, I probably have many more of those moments than the average person. In fact, hang on -- I'm having one now!

I'm back.

The point is, you won't see Mr. Irresponsible riding the escalator at the mall, yammering loudly into a small hunk of plastic about his plans for the weekend. It isn't only that I don't wish to be reached when I'm riding the escalator at the mall, or, for that matter, the fact that I don't much care for the mall. It's also that there's an implicit assumption in this act which violates every tenet of good manners -- the assumption that one's every thought is so compelling that it needs to be broadcast to the immediate vicinity. This is the purest kind of narcissism. The vast majority of our thoughts during the day are for office use only. I'll sometimes find myself thinking "I wonder what ever happened to that guy who used to play the piano on the Dean Martin Show -- what was his name, Ken something?" Or "This gum doesn't have any flavor left. I better get rid of it pretty soon. I'll keep chewing it in the meantime, though." Or "Hey, that thing looks like that other thing I saw that time!" Do you see what I mean? You don't care about these thoughts. I barely care about them myself. But the average person with a cell phone seems to feel that the capability to express his inner monologue somehow equals an imperative to do so... and that means imposing it on anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot. (There is a corollary to this: People who talk on cell phones in crowded public spaces invariably do so at decibel levels approaching those of the average leaf blower.)

With that as background, I've been troubled over the last 24 hours to read two wire stories describing new cell phone-based stranger-disturbing technologies. The first will enable subscribers to watch vintage Looney Tunes cartoons on the screens of their mobile handsets. Forget for a moment  the grave disservice this does to the memory of animators like Chuck Jones and Tex Avery, who poured endless hours of craft into each hand-inked frame of their seven-minute creations.  Here's a conversation I bet never happened:

Jones: "Man, I sure do hope people get to watch choppy broadcasts of these things on 2-by-2-inch screens someday!"
Avery: "You bet! Especially while they're driving!"

No, the real insult here is that the people offering the service don't actually intend for anyone to enjoy the cartoons at all -- they're simply being offered as one more shiny thing to mesmerize a back seat full of noisy kids into simmering down. "Industry observers," without whom Reuters would just have to stop writing entirely, have apparently dubbed this the "pass-back" phenomenon. ("Industry observers" just love the hell out of dubbing things, don't they?) In the UK, meanwhile, mobile users will soon be able to enjoy a phone-based version of Etch-a-Sketch. Which is good, because driving in London isn't terrifying enough -- you need that little extra soupçon of thrills you get from the guy behind you trying to draw a horsie with the "4" and "7" keys while maneuvering a huge Vauxhall sedan right up your tailpipe.

Mr. Irresponsible is no Luddite. I own a giant plasma TV, several Kevlar vests and the world's most powerful blender. But there ought to be a limit to the encroachment of technology, and it ought to be right at the margins of what I call the ZoPS™, or "Zone of Personal Selfishness." This is a theoretical space in which a person is entitled to be free of any real or imagined disturbances.  Everyone's ZoPS™ is constituted differently; mine is quite enormously large, comprising an area equal to the distance from my wet bar to the far side of the PGA Tour golf course on which I make my lavish yet tasteful home. Yours may well be smaller. But you have one and you are entitled to respect within its limits, and freedom from every yahoo with a Motorola flip phone and a tinnitus-inducing version of "Let's Get It Started" for a ring tone.  You are well within your rights to demand that respect of any person rude enough to violate your ZoPS™. And when he waves you off, as he is sure to do because he is deeply contemplating the tiny bowling game or teensy NFL highlights or minuscule unabridged version of "How The West Was Won" displayed on the screen before him, it is your right to drop him with a short right to the kidneys, shatter his kneecaps with a good swift kick and stomp the offending cell phone into the turf. Whatever you do, though, don't descend to his level of rudeness. When he moans that he's hurt and needs a doctor, by all means oblige him. Direct him politely to the nearest pay phone.