Your Goddamned Cell Phone

This is not an anti-technology rant, it really isn’t but it is a rant about a piece of technology: The trusty old cell phone. This isn’t about the morons who drive while talking on their Yak-Box nor is it about the people who talk on them during a movie theater and why it’s okay to kill them. Nope, I just want to enlighten you to what a pain in the ass many of you cell phonies are to the rest of society.

I work in a job where I have to answer the phone as part of my dealings with the general public. Today, just as it happens every day, the phone rings and I drop what I’m doing to pick it up. I say ‘Hello” and the person on the other end drops off the line. What has happened is that they’ve lost their cell connection because they are hurtling down the highway at 75mph or they are walking around town and stepped into an artificial canyon created by a couple of tall buildings. This call came while I was in back refilling coffee, which meant that I had to stop in the middle and rush back to the phone. After the line had gone dead I sat there for a moment and it dawned on me that I’ve lost hours of productivity at work and hours more at home in lost football and live TV time thanks to someone who’d called me while on a cell phone and driving or walking around. There is nothing more annoying than dealing with this situation either because you know that they’ll eventually call you back so your life is suspended as you wait for them to get into range of the next cell. Every once in a while, one of these people will get angry at me because of the dropped call, as if I hung up on them instead of rationalizing that their cell phone service is shit.

Here’s an idea: Stop moving!

Yes, that’s correct, pull your car over or sit your ass down when you decide to call someone up. Why? You are the intruder when you place a phone call. The person that you are calling is doing something else so you owe it to them to complete your call in one sitting whatever the reason for your call. Otherwise you become a pest; face facts, there are some of your friends whom you can only reach by voice-mail and the reason is because you have become a pain in the ass. They like you as a person but they don’t talk to you on your crappy cell phone. Cell phones have forever ruined talk radio as well, every day some caller will be in the middle of making an interesting or important conversational point when they vanish from the airwaves. It’s so fucking rude.

Look gang, if you are making a phone call treat it as the most important thing you’ll do all day. Not thinking about where you are or how long you’ll stay connected makes you a selfish puke, you’re telling whoever you’re calling that their time doesn’t matter.

I wish I could bill the phone companies for dropped calls.

Merry Christmas...Seriously.

It's Christmas Eve, 2007. It's quiet here at work so I thought I'd take a second to thank you, whoever you are who stops in to read my ramblings. I hope that I amuse you.

I'm not religious in the standard definition of the word, I'm an Episcopalian but I haven't been to church in years. I worked in a Toy Store for 17 years and I have a jaded view of the holiday season, the only thing that got me through each year was the kids and their amazing sense of wondrous excitement. I suffer from depression during the holidays, mostly because of my small income and the commercialization that reminds me of how much money I don't have. Still, I manage to get through it without ruining it for other people. Which is something that a growing group of assholes really needs to learn how to do. I'm talking about the various anti-Christmas activist-types.

I'm not talking about the Nazis at the ACLU pushing holiday displays off of government property, I'm talking about the dorks who protest everything about Christmas. Who are these people anyway? What could they possibly protest about Christmas? I'm pretty sure that they are simpletons assholes who just hate everyone. Just look at Christmas itself...

The holiday is based around the birth of Jesus Christ, in Christianity it's a distant second to Easter in importance. It's the J-Man's death on the cross that set him apart and not his birth. Some folks argue about the Gospels and how the Nativity is only covered in one of them; others point out that Jesus was born in July and there's all kinds of imagery that's open to debate from being born in a stable to the Star of David. Most all of this hoohaw misses the point of Christmas, which is to take a day and think about your fellow man for a second, lay down your arms for a few hours and help those less fortunate than yourself. Before Jesus, most religious holidays were based on fear and had a terrifying story at their base. The birth of Christ is about the hope of PEACE and a call to love your neighbor.

What kind of piece of human shit would protest that?

That question answered itself.

Anyway, to those of you who don't suck, Merry Christmas!