Are you
talking to me?
Lori Borgman | Monday, Mar 01, 2010
Women have been known to bare their souls at the grocery store. Which is why
I wasn’t surprised when the woman next to me at the apple display said that her
granddaughter had injured her ankle.
“Is that
right?” I offered sympathetically.
“They’re
taping it for now, but the poor thing may need surgery.”
“That’s
too bad,” I said, edging toward the grapefruit.
“Oh yeah, it’s bad, real bad,” the woman said.
“How unfortunate,” I said, wondering how to move to the broccoli without
seeming rude.
I looked
at the woman and said I hoped her granddaughter got better. She jerked her head
around to show me she was wearing a hands-free headset.
Bluetoothed again.
It happens
everywhere -- airports, malls, restaurants, doctors’ offices and coffee shops.
I was
washing my hands in the restroom of a big box store when a woman in a stall
screamed, “ARE YOU THERE?”
My heart
nearly jumped out of my chest -- I thought she was having a medical emergency.
Turns out she was just telling someone that, and this is a direct quote: “DON
AND THE KIDS WILL BE A LITTLE LATE.”
That woman
has no idea how close she came to having a total stranger with soapy hands and
outdated CPR certification crash through the door to her stall and administer
unneeded first aid.
When we
went to see “Blind Side,” I literally was. Some guy had his Bluetooth blinking
in my peripheral vision.
There is no question that a Bluetooth denotes a sense of importance and
urgency. Yet, most of the time, people who wearing them are saying the same
mundane things the rest of us are saying into hand-held phones.
The President’s security detail has had hands-free headsets for years. I’d
be devastated if I ever walked past one of them and heard, “A loaf of bread and
milk? Sure, I’ll pick some up on the way home.”
More than anything, Bluetooths can make ordinary people look like they’ve
simply lost their minds.
It used to be you knew someone was a few cards shy of a deck when they talked
to themselves. With the increasing popularity of hands-free headsets people
everywhere appear to be talking to themselves. It is harder and harder to tell
the very well connected from the completely disconnected.
Take the guy walking down the street, staring into space, shouting, “Let’s
have a meeting, Phil! Tuesday? Yeah! Tuesday’s good, Phil. Yeah! Tuesday! See
you Tuesday.” If he’s turned so you can’t see if he’s wearing an earpiece,
you’re not sure if there is a Phil somewhere, or if Phil is a figment of the
guy’s imagination and he has a fixation with Tuesday.
I can hear you now. We all can.
