I had a chance to try out the cell-phones-on-lanes thing today. I hate it!
No, I wasn’t on an actual plane. I took a four-hour-plus train ride between client cities on Canada’s well-run ViaRail system. The best part: no airport hassles, no need to arrive super-early, and free (if not very high speed) wireless Internet the whole way.1
So I took out my laptop, plugged it into the power outlet at my seat, and began to work.
Br-r-r-ring! For the entire trip, cell phones kept going off. Loudly. And the people who spoke into them also spoke loudly, partly out of habit, partly because there is generalized background noise in a train the way there is in a plane.
None of the users were in my row, or the row directly behind me, or the row directly in front of me. Nonetheless, their phones and then their voices rang out loud and clear. Annoyingly loud. And clear enough for me to understand their lives, if I’d been so inclined.
As the saying goes, Helloooo! We can live without cell phones for hours at a time these days.
Planes and trains afford reasonably good working conditions right now, despite the cramped seating and other shortcomings, precisely because distraction doesn’t rule. Even the squalling two-year-old in the next row eventually quiets down (and will do so more quickly if you smile at him when he turns around, rather than glowering).
It’s a lost cause, I know. Cell phones will be coming to airplanes.
I’m not looking forward to it. And I suspect in a few years we’ll look back to the “good old days” of air travel2 when we were freed from the yoke of both our own devices and the intrusions occasioned by other users.