Loud Conversation of the Day

[Caeli]

Video Im Not A Crazy Person, Im A Very Well Educated Person Hilarious Argument On Metro North Railroad Train!

Loud cell-phone talkers strike again!

A woman traveling on New York's Metro North train line was recorded by a fellow passenger telling train employees that she is too "well-educated" to be told to quiet down and not use profanity in her cell-phone conversation.

"Do you know what schools I've been to? How well-educated I am?" she asks the train employee, who is seen explaining to another employee that she asked the passenger to stop using the "F-bomb."

"I'm sorry do you think I'm a little hoodlum?" she asks, then demands her money back and dares the conductor to stop the train.

The person who originally uploaded the video to Youtube (who has since removed it) said in the description that the woman "was talking too loud on the train when the conductor politely asked her to keep it down and stop using profanity or to take it to the vestibule." After the altercation, the conductor came on the loudspeaker and reminded people to keep conversations quiet, "especially those people who went to Harvard or Yale or are from Westport."

Last month, a woman was escorted from a quiet car in an Amtrak train by police after she chatted loudly on her cell phone for most of the 16-hour journey, and then became angry when passengers asked her to stop.

[Article]

What are your thoughts on phone etiquette? >_>;

[Shjade]

I wish I could understand more of what they were saying in the first half of the video. D:

Regardless, phone etiquette? Eh... basically I'd think of it the same way as any conversation where all participants are present. If you're having a loud distracting conversation with someone in the seat next to you I imagine you'd be asked to quiet down much the same as if you're having that conversation over the phone. On the other hand, common courtesy seems to be becoming less and less common. I dunno.

I prefer it when people aren't obnoxious; it's a preference that applies to a whole load of activities.

[Martee]

My thoughts on phone etiquette are: Yes.  I wish there was such a thing.  Unfortunately, public etiquette in any form seems to have gone much the way of the dodo, or at the very least, can be considered extinct in the wild.

The woman in the video is not an exceptional occurrence although I, personally, cannot think of any reason why you would need to put on a display like that in the first place.  But, I'm not especially tied to my phone for voice conversation anyway. 

I will say that if I had a choice and any real say in the matter, I would much rather get cell phone conversations (and all other cell-phone induced distractions) off the roads.  It's one thing to piss off a train car full of people.  It's another thing entirely to operate a two-ton vehicle at something approaching the land speed record when three-quarters of your already limited mental capacity is distracted by a conversation over who said what to whom and when while they were drink off their ass last night.

Ahem.

I live in the south.  The number of Expeditions, Suburbans, and F-350 hurtling down the road with a yapping cell phone talker/texter is astonishing, and frightening.

[gaggedLouise]

On one level it seems to be a way of getting noticed, of showing off your presence to co-travellers, to the people next to you in the train, the supermarket, the library or the street. The folks doing the talking might claim they value privacy and that they don't want no eavesdropping, but at the same time they do want to pose a bit, to look cool. Hauling up a cell phone in public space has become a way of claiming an extended private zone, the phone being treated like an extra limb, part of your body. The message is, like, "You're supposed to look at me, but you're not allowed to tap me on the shoulder or to tell me, even in a low voice, to quit the talking or ask me to step aside for the moment to let people through."

I'm really not okay with it - I can see the comical side sometimes but when you have two people walking very slowly in front of you, both talking in their cell phones, or talking closely between themselves while sms'ing or gaming, and becoming almost incommunicado, that's not fun. When people use their phones in the street they often change the way they move: they hunch over, they shut off contact with the outside that's around them in this spot, they move towards the centre of walkways or alleys and in doing so they block them for anyone coming up behind them or meeting them (because their gestures are still big and they tend to saunter from side to side in the middle of the path, so you can't get by safely without securing in a heavy-handed way that you've been noticed). In short, they'll create a bubble much thicker than you would need for carrying on conversation, and kind of clog up the flow of people.. And just don't get me started on people who spend lots of time talking handsfree, so that from just a few metres distance it's often impossible to know if their ears are plugged to the phone, and if they would hear you saying "excuse me!" or "hey there!" Someone put it that advanced cell phones makes us act less like citizens, less concerned with a public space or public outreach, and this seems too true sometimes.

Libraries, concert halls/arenas/theatres, movie theatres and schools should absolutely have a strict recommendation (sometimes a downright order) to have cell phones turned off. same for parts of trains,and for airplanes in general. I don't buy it that kids need to have their cell phones - or still worse, ipads -  on all day in school, and someone whose phone starts cuckooing in a concert hall is disrupting the event everybody there has paid to come see.