A cellphone rant

I apparently have old-fashioned ideas about phone use.
In the not-so-distant past, telephones were secondary means of communication and the person physically standing in front of you, came first.
Phones have changed so drastically in the past 15 or so years. They’ve gone from something that you could only use in your own house – while completely stationary – to something that we keep in our pockets, ready to whip out anytime, anywhere.
And many people think this gives them a license to be rude to people they’re actually with.
When I was growing up in the 70s, we had two phone in the house. The main one was in the kitchen. It was a minty green color, had a rotary dial, and a cord that could stretch to about 10 feet long. No extra-long cord for our family. If you wanted to talk on the phone, you could either stand in that corner of the kitchen, or, if you stretched the cord out just so, you could stand or sit on the floor in the hallway around the corner.
When I was a teenager, we moved to a newer house and I had a phone jack in my room. (It seemed like such a luxury at the time!) One of my first purchases in that house was a phone to have in my room. Of course, it was another corded phone and was not a separate line (too expensive!), but I could talk in the privacy of my own room.
Now that phones are mobile, they intrude on our lives, no matter where we are.
For starters, it seems perfectly acceptable now to talk on the phone no matter who you’re with. There are many occasions when of course you have to answer the phone or send the text message. But there are even more times when you should wait until .
For instance, one day at the job where I worked for a few months, I was sitting by myself in the lunchroom reading a newspaper. A 20ish girl that I worked with came in and sat down directly across from me. I gladly put my newspaper down and talked to her. While we were talking, I noticed that she was looking at her cell phone, texting. Maybe I’m an old fuddy duddy, but I thought it was rude. Just as rude as it would have been of me to pick up my newspaper and start reading during our conversation.
Another pet peeve is when people visit my house and then talk on their cell phone to other people. It would be fine if it were necessary. But one person I know – who doesn’t visit us very often – has a fairly lengthy (15 or so minutes) conversation with another person every time she comes. Basically they update each other on what they’ve done since they talked earlier in the day. In the meantime, my kids are vying for this person’s attention. She’s only here for two or three hours at a time, couldn’t she wait until she leaves to talk on the cell to someone else?
And lastly, and I know I’m in the minority here, but I think it’s rude to take a call when you’re talking with someone else. My husband has done this while we’ve had dinner in restaurants (and he’s gotten an earful from me about it!). This happened also often happened when Lindsay was in dance class. I’d be talking with a mom, trying to get to know her, and her cell phone would ring. She’d stop talking to me and talk to the phone. It was hard not to develop a complex over it.
So there you have my cell phone pet peeves.