“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas


Monday, December 02, 2013

In-flight cell phone use is a bad idea....socially


The FCC is considering abandoning its ban on cell phone use before and during commercial air travel, but the government is thinking of stepping in and making rules itself. As it turns out, there is no danger to the airplane communication and cell phone use will not make the plane crash as we've been led to believe.

Look, I already hate my fellow passengers as it is. Being forced to listen to one or more of them have a one-sided conversation during an entire, say 2 hour flight, and I might strangle somebody.

People who use cell phones in public places where there are lots of people in close quarters are attention starved assholes who want everybody to overhear their conversation, but pretend they don't. The jerks who'll use cell phones on airplanes are the same people who glare at you for not keeping quiet so they can have a conversation on the elevator, or who can't put their phone down long enough to interact with a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly, or who kill people because they can't not be talking to their best girl friend driving from mall to shopping mall.

All that said, it's not the government's decision when you can and cannot use your cell phones. It's entirely up to the airline so let's hope they decide to discourage cell phone use during the flight. Most passengers hate listening to other peoples' cell phone calls and I suspect if an airline bans in-flight use, that airline will get lots of business until the rest follow suit.




2 comments:

david said...

I thought crying babies were bad. Now we will have loud adults talking on their cell phones. I've yet to overhear any cellphone conversation that was either intelligent or worth listening to.

Maybe Bose will introduce noise-cancelling headphones which block the human voice. I can't tell you how disappointed I was to discover current NC technology does nothing to block public address systems and screaming babies. Both of these are among the top annoyances during air travel.

I don't give a rat's ass what the temperature is at the destination. What, are we going to turn around or divert because it's too cold or too hot? Shut the F%^K up, fly the plane, and hand me my bag of peanuts!

Ed said...

No peanuts for you, Dave. There's like a 1/10,000 chance somebody might have an allergy to them. Only dry pretzels for you. ;-)