Mrs. Toad’s Mile High Mobile Manners
[After unfairly raising my expectations with the saucy title, Mrs. Toad has lapsed into something of a furious rant about mobile phones. She walks it the way she talks it too - I can never get the old bat on the bloody phone when I need her. Anyway, she's erm, gone a bit mental and good luck to you...]
Mobile phones are useful. Even an anti social fuck like me has to admit that. However, they also have the unfortunate side effect of turning amiable people into annoying, rude fucktards. And that is why it fills me with dismay that mobile phones will soon be allowed on planes.
Mobile phone rudeness provokes me to the point of apoplexy. People sit in the pub with phones in front of them, peering at it and fiddling with it, holding up a finger to cut fellow drinkers off in mid conversation so that their phone can be answered, texting and chuckling at incoming texts mid dinner. Strangely, no-one hits them (though I am available for random acts of violence and children’s parties if anyone wants to outsource). Remember when even having a mobile (and before that the carphone) was the mark of a total tosser?
In public places, phones constantly chirp with loud, irritating ring tones; if 666 is the Mark of the Beast, the Crazy Frog is the Mark of the Cunt. This noise apparently lets the phone’s owner know that it’s time to stop dead in the middle of a busy thoroughfare like a crippled bovine retard and engage in long conversations that make Paris Hilton sound positively intelligent by comparison. The truly inspiring knuckle grazers also manage a muttered “fucks sake” or martyred look when the hordes behind try to push past them as they exchange their bons mots. I admit that, as a Blackberry addict, I am not immune from indulging in a form of telephonic twattery, but at least by obsessing over e-mail, I’m quiet about it and rarely park myself right in front of busy escalator in the mall to engage with my addiction.
Like a car, where the cocooned environment seems to provoke a “me versus the rest of them”, attitude in otherwise placid people, the mobile phone seems to inspire truly remarkable selfishness. People turning down or postponing the demands of a strident phone in favour of their human companions is the exception rather than the rule despite the existence of voicemail. The relationship between phone user and phone is needy, slightly anxious and immediate. For the truly afflicted, the phone constantly in their hands is a sad physical manifestation of their insecurity, like those sad fucks that used to leave the Hugo Boss labels sewn on the sleeves of their suits in the 80’s.
And now, even 30,000 feet won’t be far enough away from these mongers. I travel regularly on planes and already, without mid air usage, there are particularly annoying phone patterns associated with air travel. The Touch Down call – the people who are so important that the instant the planes lands, they must whip out their phones and make a call (loudly, otherwise what’s the point). The Terminal Bore – the men (usually) who strut up and down the terminal bellowing into phones, often on a Nathan Barley headset, checking to make sure people are watching them (FYI quickly belming or making a silver quick wanking gesture knocks them off their stride). The Telephonically Immune – the people who in, defiance of all the rules that render plebs like you or I un-contactable for 10 minutes, have the unique and god given right to make and receive calls in the security areas and the customs hall. I have actually seen one of these spanners do the finger holding up thing to a customs officer who asked him to terminate his call. Funnily enough, he got pulled aside for extra immigration checks and I do that hope KY and a vigourous rubber glove were involved. Actually, fuck that, I hope they were out of KY and let the day release trainee use meths and a wire brush to have a good root around his jacksie.
Will it be popular to use mobiles on planes? A hippy view might be that since it is so annoying to have other people make phone calls on planes, considerate people won’t choose to make calls themselves, in the advancement of the mutual good. Well, fuck the hippies. No-one seems to give a shit about the mutual good since it stopped involving sitting under bushes at open air festivals, whacked on acid and indiscriminately banging people called Leaf, Wind and Moonbeam. In fact, I suspect there will be more than a few former such hippies, now encased in Brooks Brothers uniforms, among the first to bray into their Motorola flips about the S&P as the seatbelt sign pings off.
And even if it is common, surely people will be discreet? Hmmm, no.
A former (and very slight) acquaintance used to have his mates call him and then hang up when he was in trendy bars in London. The purpose being that he could stand next to hot chicks at the bar and bark into the mute handset about holding out for another million, yeah, Noel and Liam are lined up and, yes, Kate Moss should be guestlisted but that that kraut boot Claudia can fuck off. This bellend actually worked for an insurance company in the ass end of the auto claims department (until he was fired for sheer uselessness). Now, there’s no fucking way that a total cocksmoker like that isn’t going to use his mobile on a plane and there’s also no way that I am not going to want to ram it up his asshole sideways before beating his face bloody on the back of the chair in front.
I am the avenging air marshall for those who enjoy dozily relaxing on an 8 hour flight, being served hand and foot and watching movies in peace and quiet. Be warned. I fly a lot. I might be on your plane. Think before you use that phone.
Casiotone For the Painfully Alone - Don’t They Have Payphones Whereever You Were Last Night?
Blondie – Hanging on the Telephone
The Notwist – Pick Up the Phone
[You know why I love this post? Because I have been so busy all weekend with the Alela Diane session and Mrs. Toad took it upon herself to write a little something because she knew I would be struggling and I looked exhausted. So a foul-mouthed old harridan she may be, but she's a sweet lass in her own way. And I wouldn't be without her for anything, silly girl.
Oh, and she only touched on it, but there are monumental levels of Blackberry hypocrisy going on here which are really quite hilarious- T]
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You, sir, have been officially outranted. She’s one in a million, that gal o’ yours.
Leave my Blackberry alone you ring, ring, vibrate, vibrate Nokia toting, shit picture taking bastard. Silent and discreet, endlessly useful, it is the Jeeves of telecommunication.
You have, on occasion, checked your emails before getting out of bed in the morning. How is sharing a dinner table with a mobile telecommunications device any worse than sharing a bed with it?
My contract’s up soon, do you think I should get the new Nokia? The brushed aluminium one looks cool.
Ask Mrs. Toad. She’ll have mine shoved up her arse if she uses that bloody Blackberry in bed again.
Ah yes, I believe someone mentioned the ‘vibrate’ setting.
If I shouldn’t be checking emails in bed, you’d better give me something else to look at sweet pea
You can all feel free to vomit after that. I would.
Does intercourse with the Toad make you puke too?
If that person in the picture hadn’t shoved both halves of that clam-shell phone through their earlobe, then they wouldn’t have to take the phone out to make a call.
Beats bluetooth.
That photo is slightly sick making. i remember I used to work with a guy who was into piercings and tats in a big way. Popped into a bar one night with a new date and bumped into the guy, chatted to him, introduced my date to him in that “this is so and so, top bloke” kind of way and asked what he had been up to that day.
Turned out he had just been down to the tat parlour for the latest thing, a branding. He promptly peeled up his trouser leg and proudly unveiled the reddened, raised, skull shaped, weeping scar.
Needless to say, it was a brief date after that and I didn’t score that night.
There are, of course, many defense mechanisms a non-user can play when somebody fails to understand the volume required to deliver their side of the phonecall to the intended recipient, rather than the person on the opposite corner of the train carriage for example. The science of the mobile seems to be misunderstood as though the distance between handsets is directly proportional to the volume required for your own voice to be heard. Hence conversation openers such as, “Hey, sweetie. Are you at home today, only I’m on my way into town and… YOU’RE IN CARDIFF?” One of the games you can play with other people’s phonecalls if they are failing to oblige you with any degree of courtesy is by answering any questions they ask as though they are talking to you. Equally enjoyable is the recording, either by dictaphone or by taking notes of absolutely everything they say, telling them that you’re researching an article on obnoxious phone use. With this last one, for added effect, you may wish to have a phony release form for them to sign. You may also like to play the Guess That Ringtone game: if you think you know what a ringtone is, continue to sing it even after the call has been answered, if you don’t take potshots at it, asking the person whose phone it is until they satisfy you with an answer… then sing it anyway.
Or, you could clock the twat in the face with a housebrick & be done with it.