{"id":48214,"date":"2013-07-06T08:35:21","date_gmt":"2013-07-06T07:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/why-the-rude-cell-phone-users-have-won\/48214\/"},"modified":"2013-07-06T08:35:21","modified_gmt":"2013-07-06T07:35:21","slug":"why-the-rude-cell-phone-users-have-won","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/why-the-rude-cell-phone-users-have-won\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Rude Cell-Phone Users Have Won"},"content":{"rendered":"

July 5, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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Of all those minded to speak their brains in the aftermath of a Sainsbury’s worker’s refusal to serve someone<\/a> who was on their mobile phone, a section of callers to Jeremy Vine’s radio deserve a special berth in hell. “Wow,” tweeted the presenter. “People calling saying they have every right to speak on mobile at supermarket checkout, ‘because the staff work for me’.” <\/p>\n

Evidently, there really are people who imagine their mere presence in a supermarket elevates them to the position of CEO of ArseCorp, while the purchase of a pack of frozen peas and some bogroll licences them to deploy their full Princess Michael of Kent<\/a> impression. <\/p>\n

But then, I suppose that level of entitlement isn’t the greatest surprise to\u00a0those of us who frequent the badlands of urban chain retail. Only last week I was behind a woman at a till when the shop assistant was forced to ask her a question. It took quite a while to get madam’s attention, what with her focus on relaying the inexplicable details of some gentleman “not showing me respect”, but contact did finally penetrate \u2014 only for our heroine to apologise to the person to whom she was speaking, fix the checkout worker with a stunned expression, and hiss: “Er, excuse me? I’m on the PHONE?” <\/p>\n

Come my afterlife revolution, she’d be spending eternity punching 50-character numbers into tills because Satan’s barcode scanner was broken, while hell’s most churlish extras played the role of people unable to tear themselves away from phone calls about their useless sales team or Kim Sears’ hair<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In this life, alas, she seems to sail on regardless, her ilk having apparently inherited the Earth during one of those proverbial meetings I missed. It\u00a0was years ago that I first saw someone answer their phone in a cinema during the film, but I now expect it as so routine that I suspect we have moved beyond the softly-softly approach to reforming public manners, and into the-only-language-they-understand territory. <\/p>\n

In fact, I hereby move that the government immediately appoints a modern etiquette tsar, and that it is Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary<\/a>. (Already, I can’t help feeling Michael has missed a trick in not capitalising on the Sainsbury’s business by declaring that anyone who approaches a Ryanair check-in desk on their mobile will be immediately banished to the back of one of his biblical queues, or be forced to surrender that phone and check it in as a separate item of hold baggage at a cost of \u00a31,651.) <\/p>\n

Failing the O’Leary appointment, the alternative is to cocoon oneself somewhere other people’s phones can’t get. The cliche dictates you’d need to go halfway up Everest \u2014 but of course there’s now a mobile mast just by base camp, presumably to enable the tourist hordes to shout: “I’m halfway up Everest!” or “I’m having a ruck with some Sherpas<\/a>!” into their icicle-festooned handsets. I suppose there’s always my kitchen in central London, where you are without question less likely to be able to get reception than you are on the north face. Though not actually lead-lined, it appears so unreachable by all forms of modern technology that it would make an ideal Amish dwelling, or hideaway for Edward Snowden<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I once went to visit a Maasai village in Tanzania<\/a>, where a tribesman delivered a speech to our tourist party on how the village was entirely untouched by the modern world. Halfway through \u2014 and apparently without irony \u2014 we were interrupted by a buzzing, and he broke off and fumbled in his shuka before producing a top-end BlackBerry that had hit the market mere weeks previously, and took a call on it. Obviously, I\u00a0bought a ton of bracelets from him once he’d rung off \u2014 frankly, you had\u00a0to\u00a0doff your hat. <\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

July 5, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Of all those minded to speak their brains in the aftermath of a Sainsbury’s worker’s refusal to serve someone who was on their mobile phone, a section of callers to Jeremy Vine’s radio deserve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-48214","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}