Can you
hear me? Can you hear me now? Yes, we can all hear you dumbass; after all, we
are wedged like sardines in a metal tube.
Your voice is ricocheting off every surface, so…thanks for sharing the
way too personal details of your personal life.
It’s really amazing the modern-day craze to be connected all the
time. If you look around a restaurant,
shopping mall, doctor’s office waiting room, and pretty much everywhere else,
people are hunched over their telephones—texting, talking, uploading pictures,
tweeting, hash-tagging, playing games; in short, immersing themselves 100% in
the digital world. As a society, we have
a huge problem with disconnecting. Why
is that? We all seem to love the idea of ‘me’ time and have created destination
resorts to cater to just that: the unwinding of our too tightly wound
society. And yet, when people arrive at
such places they can’t seem to part from their cell phones, laptops, and
iPads. How many times have I overhead
people bitch and moan that the worst part of their ‘holiday’ was the lack of Wi-Fi
or the crap cell reception. Shutting off
someone’s cell phone is almost like taking a two year old’s security
blanket. In fact, it may be worse. Fortunately, most environments allow people
to keep their cell phones running, albeit in a non-intrusive, silenced mode.
The one big
exception to this rule: the airplane—where federal law requires individuals to
silence and shut off their beloved best friend.
And trust me, most don’t do so willingly—the typical cell phone user
would rather be committed behind bars than relinquish control of his electronic
lifeline. Or so it would seem to me and
to countless other flight attendants. The
FAA is very strict about cell phone usage on planes—or rather, any device that
can transmit and receive signals. In
response, most cell manufacturers have created this handy little feature called
‘Airplane Mode’. In short, Airplane Mode
turns off the cellular capabilities of a phone; one can still connect to Wi-Fi
and also the use phone to play games, update appointments, play with apps,
etc.—everything sans network connection.
Unfortunately, Airplane Mode is incredibly misleading. In fact, when the flight attendants follow
FAA guidelines and announce that passengers will need to turn their electronic
devices off, it actually means that everyone needs to turn their phones
completely off. Zero power. Zilch. Yes,
that means no angry birds, no iPod, and no apps.
But see,
most people don’t know that. And trying
to explain it to them is an extremely challenging task. Typically, when forced to do so, I encounter
a barrage of reactions ranging from: ‘uh…you want me to do what?’ to ‘but it’s
called airplane mode, and here I am on an airplane am I not?…so, uh…you figure
out’. Some people like to hide the phone
or iPad from us as we walk by, thinking that they outsmarted us by covering up
their electronic friend. ‘Teehee, I showed her!’ Yeah… I used to try this little stunt with my
parents; it never worked. Like your
mother, us flight attendants aren’t stupid.
We see the same stunt every single day, and we’ve lost all patience for
it. I often wish that I could confiscate
a passenger’s cell phone until the end of the flight—or at least put him or her
on time out… It’s really quite amazing
what lengths people will go through to defy the flight attendants and try to
get a few last seconds of airtime. Bad
passenger… Unfortunately, the really
guilty phone-time filchers are the flight attendants themselves. I have see flight attendants duck into a
bathroom for a last-minute text message or phone call. Some flight attendants have disconnection
fever so bad that they can be seen composing text messages at lightning speed
as the airplane is climbing, hoping beyond hope they will finish it before
losing that last little bar of connectivity—yeah, that’s pretty bad.
And then
there is the moment everyone has been waiting for: landing. The flight’s duration may have been 17
minutes or 17 hours, but no matter what, everyone rushes to power up and
reconnect. As the wheels screech across
the tarmac, a hundred cell signals begin to worm their way across the cabin as
the phones power up. For the most part, this
moment is rather benign; most passengers are doing silent phone work—the
texters, the emailers, the weather and stock checkers, the facebookers and so
on. The real menaces are the people who
feel it is appropriate to make or receive a phone call and always do so in a
booming echo. Now, I don’t know why
people feel it is okay to broadcast their personal business throughout the
plane—to tell their business partners and spouses the what for, but I really
just don’t want to hear it. Neither does
anyone else. Things that people would
never say in public are shouted across the cabin. I’ve heard people talk about an upcoming roll
in the hay with their lover (be it wife or mistress, who knows…), order a
stripper, cuss out their husband, profess their undying love in an ooey-gooey
manner, even fire someone’s ass—all with seemingly no realization that 100
other people just witnessed it. It’s as
if they forget that they are jammed into the likes of a super crowded elevator,
instead acting as if they are in a sound-chamber at home, where no one else
will hear them. It’s rather disgusting
human behavior, and for the sake of decency, I wish it would stop. Unfortunately, that is the reality of the
situation, and most likely it is just going to get worse. Ding ding….oh look, the boarding door is now
closed and we are set for departure, so now it's time to sit down, buckle your seat belts, and… SHUT THE DAMN THING OFF!!!....please.
<Smile broadly and walk away>.
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