An article written for Culinary Arts website in August 2007 about the anti-social nature of diners using their cellphones in restaurants.
For those of us with a few too many miles on the clock, it is not difficult to appreciate the advantages that cellphones have brought to a majority of the population in every developed country. But does that mean that their use should be unfettered by simple common decency?
Most of my generation would never consider having a mobile phone with them in a restaurant. We would not want to receive any calls whilst enjoying the company of whomever we were sharing a table with, plus we could only realistically expect them to starve to death if they had to wait for us to make a call before we ordered. So I leave the thing either in the car or, if I’m going to travel on public transport, at home. After all it has an answering machine built-in, so anybody wanting to talk to me can leave me a message telling me what they want, and even if they don’t, it will snitch on them as soon as I get back by bleeping at me like an insistent child until I look at the number it has loyally saved for me. I humour it by showing it that I have looked at the seeds of its labour, but I have no intention of ringing whoever it was. After all, if they couldn’t spare the few seconds it would take to tell me why it was so all-fired urgent to talk to me, then it can’t have been that life-threatening a piece of information in the first place. Read the full article