I'm In Yer Sound Range, Hatin' Yer Tawk
Jul. 6th, 2007 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plumtreeblossomObservation:
We live in a cell phone world, but it was a mistake to let phone booths fade into history. We need them back, to spare us from public-private conversations.
Go absolutely anywhere, and you will be privy to one side of any number of conversations. You'll hear the details of the GYN appointment, the meta about dinner, the helicopter parent micro-managing their college student. There's a young woman who is usually on my morning bus with an impossibly high-pitched voice, who spends the entire ride talking to Sweetie. "What are you doing now Sweetie? Are you having breakfast? Are you having a banana, or cereal, Sweetie? What did you say, Sweetie? I can't hear you cuz we hit a bump..." I picture Sweetie as a hairy and corpulent semi-employed truck driver in dirty boxer shorts, perhaps driving his roommate crazy with his "uuhs" and "whatevahs."
Outside the home, we used to have lots of small glass boxes just for telephone calls. They afforded a measure of privacy for the caller, and acted as a partial sound barrier so that those outside the box weren't subjected to a conversation they weren't supposed to be hearing.
At work, as a courtesy to all in our open floor plan office, if we get a call on our cell phone that isn't work-related we take it out in the hall. But try having a phone conversation out in the hall, where there are 7 or 8 other people having a phone conversation out in the hall. You can't hear yourself think.
I would delight at seeing booths resurrected for those courteous enough to have at least some of their cell phone conversation inside the booths. The booths don't need to even have landline phones in them. Just a privacy booth. Privacy. I'd use it.
Sometimes I worry how far we actually are from open floor plan public restrooms...
We live in a cell phone world, but it was a mistake to let phone booths fade into history. We need them back, to spare us from public-private conversations.
Go absolutely anywhere, and you will be privy to one side of any number of conversations. You'll hear the details of the GYN appointment, the meta about dinner, the helicopter parent micro-managing their college student. There's a young woman who is usually on my morning bus with an impossibly high-pitched voice, who spends the entire ride talking to Sweetie. "What are you doing now Sweetie? Are you having breakfast? Are you having a banana, or cereal, Sweetie? What did you say, Sweetie? I can't hear you cuz we hit a bump..." I picture Sweetie as a hairy and corpulent semi-employed truck driver in dirty boxer shorts, perhaps driving his roommate crazy with his "uuhs" and "whatevahs."
Outside the home, we used to have lots of small glass boxes just for telephone calls. They afforded a measure of privacy for the caller, and acted as a partial sound barrier so that those outside the box weren't subjected to a conversation they weren't supposed to be hearing.
At work, as a courtesy to all in our open floor plan office, if we get a call on our cell phone that isn't work-related we take it out in the hall. But try having a phone conversation out in the hall, where there are 7 or 8 other people having a phone conversation out in the hall. You can't hear yourself think.
I would delight at seeing booths resurrected for those courteous enough to have at least some of their cell phone conversation inside the booths. The booths don't need to even have landline phones in them. Just a privacy booth. Privacy. I'd use it.
Sometimes I worry how far we actually are from open floor plan public restrooms...
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-07 04:02 pm (UTC)As for overhearing what I think should be private, I'm not much bothered by it. If somebody's talking too loud, which happens often, that is a problem, but a different one. I'm pretty sure I avoided using the cell phone my workplace required me to have for trashing my own privacy and the privacy of the people I talked with on it. I treasure such privacy as I can get! If others want to trash their own privacy in my presence, however, I doubt it's my problem. I'm likely to think the people are careless and utterly stupid for doing it, and never mind what I may opine based on the conversation half itself. And since the person on the other end is also getting something of a privacy wipe-out, I may hope that he or she can put a stop to the wrongheaded behavior. But I don't take it as an invasion of my space if others want to make noises that I'd make only in hiding--unless, as I said, they're too noisy.