Here are the cell phone uses which irk me the most:

Supermarkets, calling home to see if something is needed when you just left home with the list in hand.

Coming out of movie theaters and calling everyone you know with your review of it.

Calling your home from the driveway or garage of that same home, after just leaving or before entering.

Calling someone in one room of your house from another room in your house.

Then there is text messaging, a whole other exercise for those wishing to rest their voices in-between calls.

Yes we are going to hell in a handbasket.

I first noticed this a number of years ago as an early user of the Internet messaging program called ICQ. The program and it’s intended use seemed simple enough at first: Get online; see other people you know online; send simple short messages to one another rather than trading longer e-mails.

It was so handy that you soon found you had given your ICQ number out to far too many people, some of whom seemed to have nothing else to do but send ICQ messages all day. Soon the program got much more complex, as it added options to allow you to “remain invisible” while still seeing your friends online (unless they too were invisible). Soon what could have been a handy utility became rather useless, unless you had the discipline to only share your ID with a select few, and those few all had some common sense about how to use it.

Cell phones are similar I think. For some of us the novelty wore off years ago, having to carry a beeper at all hours for a few years did it for me, for others the “star trekiness” of carrying a personal communicator all day will never lose its charm. These people seem UNABLE to think to themselves, or can’t come up with enough interesting things to think about. One former co-worker calls me on his cell phone almost every day. I finally figured out that I was one of several people he used to keep awake on his long drive home (who he calls on his trips in I don’t know, a “morning person” no doubt). I’ve suggested he take up coffee drinking, but apparently nothing works for him better than running his mouth (my contributions to the conversation generally go something like: “uh huh”, “right”, “yeah”). After I picked up on this phenomena I noticed I was taking this role for a number of people. I’ve started working on becoming less of a good listener. I have to be careful though, I wouldn’t want one of MY monologues to cause someone to go into a ditch.