Digg featured a story about a New Yorker, John Clifford, who takes it upon himself to harass commuters on the Long Island Rail Road if they are using their cell phones. He has been charged with hitting users, throwing coffee at them, and yelling obscenities at them — and even after being arrested for this behavior eight times, hasn’t been convicted.
In our APOC classes we’ve been immersed in cell phones lately. I take public transportation to work (when I don’t have night classes), and while there are obnoxious commuters on the bus every now and then, the majority of people who are talking on their cells are not rude. There are the people who have those beeping walkie-talkie Nextel phones, which are annoying by definition. Yes, occasionally there is the unbelievable guy whose voice penetrates the whole interior of the bus as he relates his adventures to a buddy. I still remember one loud young man who, it turns out, was on his way to court. He was spinning it to his friend on the phone so that it showed how cool he was, and everybody else on the bus had to hear what he was talking about, whether we liked it or not. I am usually hooked up to my iPod and can generally ignore most of this stuff, but his loud voice overpowered my tunes. That is like the reading we had in Professor Williams’ class earlier in the semester on “backstage” v. “frontstage” — from No Sense of Place — the rude cell phone user ignores those around him and draws all of them into his backstage, whether we helpless onlookers like it or not.
As for our subway, cell phones don’t work on L.A.’s red line, which I also take, so Clifford would be happy as a clam on it. But his actions seem much worse than anything a cell phone user could be inflicting upon the rest of the train car. Throwing coffee at someone?
I wonder what he’d do when confronted by the crazy/attention-seeking people on my red-line train, who try and sing to the whole train car, while most of the commuters are either too sleepy, too unimpressed, or too polite to pay the crazy people any attention.
And of course Clifford, as an act of celebration at not being convicted, lights up a huge stogie outside the courtroom. Even outdoors, cigars are much more rude than overhearing the average cell phone conversation. Yuck.
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