Quoted Text

Here's an earful on cellphone nuisance  
First published: Tuesday, June 26, 2007

On occasion, I've written about the cellphone craze, which is beyond the limited comprehension of my pointed head. Conversations with friends, enemies and even strangers seem to agree the trend is lunacy.
  
A heavy hitter questioning the sanity of the practice is Joey Reynolds. He hosts an all-night, coast-to-coast radio show carried in the Capital Region on WROW (AM 590).

He's a levelheaded guy with frequent interesting guests who discuss controversial and other informative issues. Last week, he said two questions about cellphones drive him nuts.

"How did people communicate before the cellphone mania? What do the people forever glued to their cellphones talk about?" I've asked many the same questions without a coherent answer.

Some cellphone scenes are a trip. At Crossgates Mall, I saw a mother, father and teenage son exiting a cinema. All three simultaneously whipped out phones. Maybe a family that phones together, stays together?

While I was downing a midnight meal at the Latham '76 Diner, a middle-aged loner in a nearby booth talked loudly. He babbled on endlessly, disrupting the non-phone conversations of others.

The next night, national talk show host Michael Savage had a similar dining experience. He said some joker made himself a nuisance by hollering on the cellphone between forkfuls of linguine. "I wanted peace and quiet during my meal, so I left," he said.

A man older than me -- that's old -- wearing one of those Bluetooth earplugs was yapping away rudely in another booth. You'd need 10 men and a boy to hold me down long enough to install that contraption.