Sunday, October 30, 2005

Give me a break

YES!! I want a break from phones..There..I said it. It all started when I was young and mom asked me to book some train tickets . I went to the railway station full of vigour ,only to behold a long line,which I used to call a "queue" before. In the sweltering heat,sweating and standing behind another unfortunate being like self,my moods were shifting from moments of desperation to depression and finally exhilaration when I reached the counter after an hour.Did I say an hour .....NO! It felt like 5 hours and that feeling of happiness when you reach the counter and see the attendant asking for your form ,can never be explained.It has to be experienced. And just when I was basking in my glory of reaching the destination, a ring emanated from this black thing called a "pone"...I wanted to yell,"Hey !! I was in line first , not the damn phone" . How come, this little instrument which rang a minute ago gets the utmost priority when I have been standing in the line for hours ?
Have you ever thought about it? Why do we give so much of importance to this little instrument? How many times have we stopped our conversation in mid sentence to answer the phone? If there were a bunch of aliens looking at earth, there conversation will be like," All these earthlings are controlled by these minute creatures that they carry in their pockets . These creatures rule earth. They just stick on to their ears and dont let go.Earthlings really have to struggle especially when they are driving,eating or even attending nature's call.I am sure they are programming their brains."
Try not to pick up your phones the next few days if you are doing something important,which could be even sitting alone with your thoughts.See if you can make it...

5 comments:

bumblebee said...

I think people might give it priority because it is not known who is calling and more importantly why they are calling.

I had the habit of ignoring the call waiting signals when I was talking to someone, because I could always lookup who is calling. One such day, someone with an important message was trying to reach me, and I did the same. I realized later that I should have picked up and felt very bad about it later. Henceforth I decided I would always pick up as long as I could get to the phone.

But, the phone is not the only culprit. Think about people who give preference to TV over real human beings.

I have met some people who will not talk to anyone during certain TV shows. If you want to communicate something that came to your mind, you need to wait until the next commercial :-( And when it comes you have a quick 2 minutes to complete your train of thoughts, even though commercials last longer than that. If you exceed that, you have lost their attention because they are thinking, "When is she going to stop, the TV show is going to start any minute now" It is funny that the TV gets absolute priority over anyone else. These people also prefer that guests don't drop in at that time!

I have a good mind to blow the TV up many times and I would if it did not stain my carpet or walls.

Suresh Sankaralingam said...

I guess, more than phone, it is about communication, irrespective of whether you want to communicate or not... I am worried about the video based phones, where people can notice your expressions as well...:)... Nowadays, if I dont recognize a number, I dont pick up the call.. If it is really urgent, they would leave a message anyway...

Tell me about TV. I dont know what is the deal between women and TV... They just dont seem to listen to any word one says when they are deeply engrossed in watching TV shows, even if it is a show that they have watched before. One can never talk about useful things like shopping or cooking or any such thing when they are hooked onto TV. Mostly, all you get is a "hmm..hmm..hmm...hmm...What?...hmm..hmm.." which internally means ".......What?......" I wish I have a mechanism to launch myself into that TV channel whenever I want to, so that I will be seen talking in the TV and information can be exchanged...hopefully...

PS: A small typo... Search and Replace women with men...:)

BrainWaves said...

Well said and rightly said.

I have love-hate relationship with phone. I love to talk to people but again I hate the fact that it puts other things to back-burner.

We have two opposites at our house. Phone-o-mania (me) vs Phone-o-phobia (my wife). Average on-call time of her < 1 minute to my 10+ minutes, speaks for itself :)

On the side note, did you notice in most of the old couples, women takes the role of talking in phone and men hand-over the phone asap to their better(talking)half?
In some families this role may be reversed but it is always one person who takes over the control of phone as if that rule is being implicitly agreed after 20 years of marriage :)

bumblebee said...

Yes Brainwaves, I have noticed that with my parents-in-law. The "she" is the designated driver.

Survivor said...

Have you also noticed in our previous generation, usually one person has the role of dialing the phone too. I have seen that with my parents as well as parents-in-law. The men always have the responsibility of dialing the number .