Cellphone Manners
Cellphone calls should be put on hold while you’re using a public restroom
C’mon: Put your calls on hold while you’re using a public restroom.
I’m amazed by how often I find myself party to the following alarming scenario. I’m in an airport restroom, and the guy in the next stall is blathering away on his phone. It’s typically a business thing. “No,” he says. “I don’t think the numbers work on that.” Or: “Look, I gotta do Baltimore first. We’ll deal with Dallas later.”
I hear the rumbling roll of the toilet-paper dispenser and I wonder, “Can’t whoever he’s talking to hear that?” And that is one of the least distressing noises that might infiltrate such a conversation.
I’m not someone who goes around looking to be appalled. But really, guys. Can’t we all agree that this is, you know, a gross violation?
Digital technology has outrun social decorum on so many fronts. It’s no longer clear, for instance, that the glance down at your phone while you’re sitting in a group conversation is a breach of etiquette. People wince, wax briefly apologetic ... and do it anyway. So one can imagine the rationale for the bathroom GoToMeeting. We’re all trying to fill in our down time, right? So why not our pants-down time? When you really examine it — when you look at it practically — what exactly is so wrong with it?
Since you asked, I’ll explain. First, think about how you were brought up. Manners are the residuum of a decade-plus of lessons painstakingly implanted by parents to help you make your way in the world with minimal offense; to remind you that there exists a dimension beyond the merely practical. Is your smartphone potty parley what your mother would have wanted for you?
Second, it’s well documented that overhearing cellphone conversations is irksome; research suggests that the overheard “halfalogue” sends our minds scrambling to fill in the other side. It’s worse when that other side consists of someone who has no idea what yucky intimacy he’s being subjected to. But we know.
And that’s another problem. The stall talker implicates us in a little Hitchockian moment. We are witness to — we overhear — a small but grisly crime. “The Girl on the Train” has become The Guy in the Stall.
If none of this deters you, then what about God? Scripture depicts God as the All-Seeing One, who is looking when no one else is present. Both Old Testament and New brim with the reminder of God’s omniscience. “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me,” writes the Psalmist. “Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely.” Surely that includes words spoken in a bathroom stall. In Hebrews 4:13 we read that “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight.” Centuries of theologians have expounded the theme, preparing us for what the Gospel of Matthew calls “the great day of account, before angels and men, when all secret things shall be brought to light.”
As libertarian-minded Americans, we have trouble discerning, let alone damning, the victimless crime.
But there exist offenses that fall short of murdering or stealing; the concept of the venial sin was invented to single out precisely those little disgraces that veer away from the ideal. Stall talker, you are failing to seek the beautiful, and sullying it instead. You are in casual thrall to the boorish, and in your thrall you have recruited an unsuspecting accomplice. (Or maybe he is in a bathroom in some other airport, in which case you deserve each other; as they say, pigeons of a feather — well, I won’t go there!) You are acting as if no one is looking. But God is. “Would not God find this out?” asks the Psalmist. “For He knows the secrets of the heart.”
To you, potty phoner, I offer my own confession: When I hear you talking, I am often tempted by the mischievous urge to fabricate, by means of timeless schoolyard vocalizations, certain raucous noises that would expose your crass game and free that distant halfaloguer from his unwitting complicity in boorishness.
So put the phone away. Do your business, then go do your business. Because even if God isn’t listening, a little devil might well be.