Beer and a boost

Phone chargers are the ‘new coat hooks’

It’s not free to charge your cellphone at the Pug, a Washington, D.C. watering hole. Customers who need a boost when their batteries die must pay a price. The price is their dignity. Tired of the perpetual requests to charge phones — and then track down the owners once the phones are juiced up — bartender Russell De Leon purchased striped top hats, à la The Cat in the Hat, in a variety of colours. Anyone who wants a charge has to wear one of the hats for as long as the phone is plugged in.

“We won’t give you a hard time, but we’re not going to charge it if you don’t wear the hat,” said owner Tony Tomelden. No one is spared: “My wife had to wear the hat.”

When the choice is between wearing an ugly hat for a little while, or not being able to text, Snapchat or swipe on Tinder for an entire evening, people always choose the hat. Embarrassment is fleeting, and not having access to Instagram is, well, also fleeting. Once your phone is juiced up, you can milk the situation for likes by posting photos of yourself wearing the hat of shame.

There’s a clinical term for this antsiness about a dead phone: nomophobia, or nomobile- phone phobia, the fear of not having access to your smartphone.

“Nomophobes f eel extremely anxious when their phones go dead, because they tend to have a strong desire to be available, to stay connected, to have information at their fingertips,” said Caglar Yildirim, a PhD candidate at Iowa State University studying human computer interaction.

Of course, our collective phone addiction is nothing new. What’s changed are customers’ expectations. Everyone assumes that every place should be able to charge their phone, every time. And not just restaurants: I was once having a text conversation with a friend who suddenly went silent. When she returned to the exchange 20 minutes later, she apologized: Her battery was running low, so she’d handed her phone to a pharmacist to charge.

“People always use their cellphones, but it wasn’t as integral a part of everyday life as it is now,” says Paul Carlson, thinking back to the occasional plea for an outlet that he’d get when he opened a wine bar eight years ago. Nowadays, “they’re always inquiring where the nearest plug is.”

His bartenders field multiple requests each night to charge phones behind the bar. And in the restaurant, he often sees phones semi- unattended, plugged into wall outlets. That’s why, when he opened his new restaurant, the Royal, last year, he made sure to install outlets near every table and at every other seat at the bar. If people need a charger, it’s no problem — his staff just pulls one from the collection of chargers that other guests have left behind.

Not every restaurant will be so accommodating. Some bartenders think the constant requests for a charge interfere with their ability to do their jobs. Especially if the customer doesn’t ask politely.

“There’s just now this attitude, like, ‘What do you mean, you’re not going to charge this phone?’” says Tomelden, referring to guests who don’t believe him about the hat.

“They’re just, like, rude to start with — add a little bit of alcohol to that, and it gets worse,” said Jo-Jo Valenzuela, vice- president of the D.C. Craft Bartenders Guild. “If you’re going to be asking for something like that, you should be a lot more polite.”

Valenzuela always accommodates his guests, but some nights, he gets as many as five phone-charging requests in an hour — more than the number of chargers or outlets available. Bartenders used to always keep a lighter on hand for customers who needed a smoke. “Nowadays when I tend bar, I bring chargers,” says Valenzuela.

Last year, at Seattle restaurant Hitchcock, chef Brendan McGill r anted on Facebook about a restaurant’s role in charging phones: “Folks seem to be taking less responsibility for their personal devices and their respective batteries,” he wrote, asking whether he should “make some groundbreaking policy, say, a $ 5 menu charge for using our well- stocked electrical charging station?”

Ultimately, the restaurant went with a less contentious solution. “We ended up buying a charging system,” wrote McGill in an email. “It’s worked great.”

Battery anxiety has spawned a micro-industry of pay-by-the-minute cellphone charging lockers. A portable battery — or, even better, free in- bar outlets — are now a basic amenity in restaurants and bars.

“It’s the new coat hook,” said Fritz Brogan, who owns the D. C. bars Mission and Hawthorne. He has installed both regular and USB outlets at every seat in the latter.

Brogan used to have a charger locked into a wall at Mission, but, he says, a guest stole it within four hours of installation. He used to let bartenders charge phones behind the bar, but that became too much of a chore. “It was slowing things down,” he said. “Other customers were annoyed that they weren’t getting their drinks fast enough.”

Besides, he didn’t want to be responsible for any mishaps. “We had an incident where someone had liquor spilled on their phone. The customer wanted us to pay for it,” he said. A few times, phones would mysteriously disappear from behind the bar. “We ended up paying for it,” he said. “That was the last straw.”

If you’re in a bar and you do need a charge, etiquette expert Lizzie Post, greatgreat- granddaughter of Emily, offers some commonsense advice: Ask politely, and “wait for a moment when the bartender is not too busy,” she said.

If they say no, “accept that politely.” If they say yes, “Don’t ask them to be your personal secretary” and check your texts or messages for you. “I also wouldn’t leave it there all night and hog that amenity,” she said. The same advice applies to airports, concerts or anywhere else you see people congregating around outlets.

But if you’re in a bar, this last piece of advice should go without saying: Tip well.

THERE’S A CLINICAL TERM FOR ANTSINESS ABOUT A DEAD

PHONE: NOMOPHOBIA