h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It is impossible nowadays to go anywhere withiut being baraged with a million different beeps, blips and various different polyphonic ringtones! It used to be that a text alert was to let you know when you had a message. Now it says, 'Hey world look at this guy he has a message'. The cinema was one of the few refuges, where all turned of their god forsaken mobiles. But this is no more. No longer do people respect this sacred rule. BEEP 'Hi Eddie? No i can talk it hasen't started yet'. Never have i wanted to kill someone in the cinema so much!
The mobile phone threatens to destroy our entire social system.
At certain points throughout the day, people were forced to interact with those around them because of a lack of things to do sheer boredom. Leading to good friendships and a nice social fluidity. Now these people just whip out their mobiles and immediatly errect a social barrier.
We have become the mobile phone generation. Is this really something to be proud of?
It is a disease. It is spreading and it is getting worse.
I have a mobile, I have nothing against the possesion of a mobile as long as it is set to vibate or on silent not to squak with all its mechanical voice!
It is a means of communication thats it! Now mobiles do a thousand other things which in itself is not a bad thing but it is extending the amount of time spent on them. The addiction grows untill you find that if you were to lose ot or the battery dies you feel an imennse loss and a disturbing paranoia, a creeping dread, dispair, helplessness and doubt. And being without the thing that took up so much of thie time leaves them with an enormous feeling of empyness. I do know the feeling.
So please, please keep you phone on silent?

Some months ago, I was travelling by train from London. A female person of the opposite sex decided to go through every ring tone on her mobile, then, for good measure, she did it again. By the third time, even the most stoical of us Brits, upper lips as stiff as they come, were looking at each other, waiting for the hero among us to emerge, and make vocal our strenuous (and silent) protests. He must have been a shy chap, or deaf; we never met him/her.

? Interesting construction. Is this just your way of telling us your sex?
In Ireland, cinemas have recently been given permission to block all incoming calls to mobiles inside, and all outgoing calls from them except to emergency numbers. Let's hope it happens soon!

This is a second- or possibly third-hand story. I think I came across it in the Reader's Digest (think of the sacrifice I'm making in admitting that!).

A businessman on a train was loudly explaining to his wife why he would be home late. She was upset and the conversation was degenerating into a row, to the discomfit of the other passengers. A woman leaned across the aisle and spoke into the phone mouthpiece: "Never mind, dear; come back to bed."

There is a rule against using mobiles on French trains, and they more or less observe it; I saw a man talking *very quietly* into a phone on one.

Funny, you don't have to shout, so why do people walk down the street talking (apparently) to someone in the next street, while holding a phone?

Possibly because people are used to having the sensation of the receiver close to their mouths on their Land lines and so when that feeling is removed, coupled with the fact that they know its quite far away no matter how strong the receiver, they feel the need to shout, in their mind, to be heard!
They should all be hung!