Mobile Phone Ignorance
Many years from now, when the wise men of the future look back at the downfall of the human race in the 20th and 21st Centuries, I have no doubt at all that they will cite the mobile phone as the beginning of the end.
This device has a hell of a lot to answer for. From it’s social implications to the tiny annoyances that become so frequent and widespread that they end up driving you up the wall with anger … to the completely anti-social, purposely irritating and offensive uses to which certain unbearable elements of the human race put them.
Let’s begin with something universally annoying.
Why is it that so many people insist on having their ringtones set to maximum volume? Fair enough, in a lot of noisy situations, it’s perfectly reasonable to have your phone turned up loud enough to hear. But for example, the quiet zone on a train – does that situation warrant a ringtone volume that would cut through the sound of a hundred hyenas giving birth?
It’s the complete lack of consideration for others that really gets to me in this particular example. There’s no way that these people simply forget that their phone isn’t in silent mode – because they’re exactly the same people that you can see prodding at the damn things every few seconds in case there is a new text message or Facebook Status Update that they’ve somehow missed since the last prod.
Do they think we want to hear their crappy little ringtone?
Are they trying to boast about their taste of music?
And do they really believe that BLARING out Akon’s latest for 20 seconds every time they get a call is the way to do it?
We don’t care! Put it on vibrate, you unbelievable arsehole!
Plus, once these tossers have let their shitty ringtone play for what seems like an eternity, we then have to endure their half of the conversation as they proceed to yell into the phone like it’s a baked bean tin connected by a length of string to the other party, a good 20 miles away.
Here’s a tip for you.
If you have to speak at a level that is even slightly above normal conversational volume just to be heard, chances are there’s something wrong with your phone.
“Wot? Summink wrong wiv ma wikid, perfect i-fone?”I hear you cry with that same slurred, broken English and with the same strangely simultaneously bored and annoyingly overenthustastic tone in which you carry out your lengthy conversations about absolutely nothing.
…
Yes. Stop yelling and get it fixed, you retard.
This brings me nicely onto something that I like to call “Chav FM”: The free music broadcast service available on the top deck of every bus in Great Britain!
Whenever I use public transport, it always astounds me that I’ve never seen a news story about one of those chavvy little teenage fuckwads that frequent the upper deck of buses being force-fed his own mobile phone by someone that has just finally snapped after putting up with the onslaught of the shit music they insist on pumping out of their tinny handsets for the entirity of the journey. It wouldn’t be quite as annoying if they occasionally played something worthwhile. Something that could actually be classed as music. But it’s always the worst kind of R&B and Rap music that they can possibly find.
Not that their taste in music is the real issue here. Again, it’s the total mind-numbing self-important lack of consideration for the people around them that sparks my fury.
There are times when what I feel like more than anything at seven o’clock in the morning is a good twenty minute blast of loud, obnoxious metal. But, not being a fucking wanker, I don’t inflict it everyone around me! I am fully aware of the social construct of our society and I like to live within it – in the hope that others will pay me the same courtesy.
Obviously, I’m constantly disappointed.
These Chav FM DJ’s are a huge offender in my mind and need stringing up by their genitals until they see the error of their ways.
But I digress …
Now, I’ve banged on about Facebook in the past, so I’ll keep this short.
One of the mobile phone’s biggest crimes against humanity is affording it’s user the opportunity to constantly “check” and “update” the plethora of so-called Social Networking sites.
The irony, of course, being that the very act of ignoring your ACTUAL friends even when they are sitting right next to you in order to send an inane message to one of your fake friends on the internet is INCREDIBLY rude and ANTI-social.
The use of Facebook is a perfect example of how the mobile phone is turning entire generations into ignorant, rude and self-important idiots.
Now, I never count myself completely out of my sweeping generalizations! I don’t mind admitting that I read Twitter updates for probably 30 to 40 minutes every day. But I consider Twitter to be in a different league of “Social” site than anything else. There’s no pretense of following famous people to be their “friend“. If you’re following someone, it’s because you are actually interested in what they have to say.
A very accurate comment appeared in my feed just a couple of days ago.
Twitter makes me like people I’ve never met while Facebook makes me hate people I know in real life.
So incredibly true. Although, it’s not just the content of the updates that makes me hate them. It’s the frequency in which they prod the updates into their phones while I’m trying to have a converasation with them. Just makes me want to punch them right in the fucking mouth.
This ties in with a kind of mobile phone ignorance that I’ve disliked for as long as I can remember. Way before social networking was the craze, in the very same way that Facebook kills conversations now, the text message became one of the most offensive things in my life.
In my mind, if I am face-to-face with a friend and we are mid-conversation and my phone alerts me of a text message … the person in my presence takes precedence! It seems so amazingly obvious to me that it’s just unbelievably rude to hold your hand up to someone with whom you are actually talking, stop the converastion practically mid-fucking-sentence so you can read a text message!
You ignorant, arrogant twat!
In these situations, I simply break off the conversation and walk away. Obviously, the person is not actually interested in what I’m saying – so why bother?
And finally, bringing it back to something on which we can hopefully all agree … text message abbreviations.
It has become the “in thing” to spell as much of your messages incorrectly as possible and this offends me on several levels.
Obviously, as a user of the English language, I make an effort to use it in the way it was meant. Maybe my grammar isn’t perfect on occasion, but I certainly try to speak and write properly when it matters. So, to see this trend of purposeful misspelling and unnecessary abbreviation growing around me makes my blood boil!
It’s not interesting, nor is it clever to act thick.
On the other hand, we have the people that simply ARE thick. It always makes me cringe when I see misspelled words on signs outside shops or in pubs … and even on television, usually in adverts for upcoming programmes on the badly run satellite and cable channels. This general dropping of the general public’s average IQ can certainly be linked to the lack of proper spelling and grammar in text messages and emails alike.
People tend to see the dislike of incorrect spelling and grammar as a “pet hate“. Something on which only total pedants waste their time. Well, I disagree. Reading a message laced with spelling errors is like listening to a song being sung out of key. It’s something that a lot of people simply cannot ignore. It’s lazy, unnecessary and just plain annoying.
Third, it’s abbreviations. You can ask people why they opt for “c u l8r” and they’ll tell you that it’s simply quicker and easier to type that than “see you later”.
Um, BULLSHIT.
Predictive text wes designed to make composing messages quicker and easier than selecting every letter separately in that manner. In fact, on many handsets you have to turn the predictive text function off to use these “handy” abbreviations! Can you begin to even imagine the amount of money that has been spent over the last fifteen years in creating this functionality … only to see it ignored? It doesn’t bare thinking about!
You might argue that predictive text doesn’t work. Well, the problem is that it assumes that you know how to spell. As I’ve already established, if you’re one of those people that has difficulties, it’s probably because you’re a bit thick.
Furthermore, on a lot of more recent handsets, they keyboards are qwerty! The very same layout that you use every day on your computer. So, it should be absolutely no problem to type a short message properly without having to resort to childish abbreviations for as many of the words as you can. Are you so fucking lazy that you’re making the effort to save yourself 3 or 4 key presses per message?
Get over yourself, you irritating cunt.
MisterShouty 