Shut it in Public!

As a person working in the mobile phone industry, you think I would be tolerant to people using their mobile phones in public situations.

Think again.

As I rode the 147 bus to work yesterday morning, this middle aged woman kept pacing the bus while on her phone. Her hair was a tangle of bad blond color jobs thrown into a bun, spilling everywhere. Thick, Euro style glasses framed her not-going-gently-into-the-goodnight face. And she seemed intent on letting everyone on the bus hear all about her business:”…Yeah, I know… we can discuss over lunch… That sounds great, I love that place… oh shit, I’m almost to the office, but wait until I tell you…”, on and on, blah blah blah, and you pretty much get the gist from there. What made it worse was that she danced about, couldn’t decide whether to exit the front or the back of the bus, and if you got up to exit, she immediately ran the opposite direction as if she feared someone might, I don’t know, touch her.

It borders between amusement and annoyance for me, these people on the CTA. Annoying, when trapped on the Red Line with the Senn High School Teenager and her three girlfriends, who incidentally reeked of BO and were not wearing any underwear (and before you ask, you could not help BUT notice), as they are jawing away at top volume about wanting “to kick tha’ bitches ass, ya knaw?”. On the other hand, priceless when you overhear (and I swear this is true) “Yeah, I just got paroled… no, no computers , at least for 5 years… I don’t know, I may need to move, too… I need a fix, can you hook me up?”.

I do have to say while the bus babblers are bad, the talk-as-you-shop-girls are worse. Nothing pissed me off more when I worked at the Gap, you were trying to finish ringing up a customer, and North Shore Nancy was jawing on the phone with her Soccer Mom gal pal, ignoring everything around her. God forbid if something rang up incorrectly; Nancy would give you the glare, then the eye roll, and then snap into her Motorola, “Sheila, I gotta call you back, these Gap idiots don’t know what they’re doing,” and in a huff flip the phone close and start in on the rant. Nails on the chalk board. But North Shore Nancys are a whole ‘nother rant… trust me.

Granted, I’ve talked on my phone too when in public, and sometimes, I’ve actually have exclaimed interesting tidbits of randomness out just for pure shock value. It can be fun, watching the horrified expressions of those evil eavesdroppers who have nothing better to do than to stick their nose into your business. But I have never intentionally had an intimate or personal conversation with someone while in public, spilling all of my deep and dark secrets to the unwitting listeners around me at the top of my lungs. My friend Erin noted over lunch today that sometimes the loud ones can’t help be but overheard, so eavesdropping in these cases are legal and justified. No arguement there. But if you have to engage in a call, and you are trying to keep it on the DL yet some nosy bitch has nothing better to do than her soduko and cock one ear to the side for juicy gossip, then by all means call her out and give her some BS so to make an ass of herself with.

It’s easy to keep your conversations private, whether you are on the bus or in a store. Just say, ‘I’ll call you back’. Or don’t answer unless it’s work or an emergency. Or text it for goodness sake. If you still want to shout, TYPE IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

But please, when I have my music headset on and I still know what you did last night at Krem, it’s time for you to shut it. Or I will be standing up and doing it for you. Seriously.