Bubble Boy

My newest annoyance with incivility is this propensity that people have to speak on their cell-phones when standing at a cash-register. Now I’m well aware that this is probably something I have done many times in my day but I vow to stop this anti-social behavior. You see this often and it seems to transcend typical demographics, it happens just as often with a 20 year old kid from the projects as it does a 55 year old woman from the Upper East Side. There is no etiquette at all, it’s all disregarded because as soon as somebody picks up their phone it’s as if they are now in a complete bubble.


Let me ask this: When exactly did it become OK to ignore a person in front of you to concentrate on the person on the phone? You see this happened a lot but it’s most demeaning when you see somebody blabbing on their phone as they are being attended to by a cashier.

Just yesterday standing online at Target it struck me how disgusting it is when I saw a woman in a full conversation on her IPhone while the poor cashier was trying to ring her up. This woman couldn’t be bothered to even help move items down the conveyer belt because she was so engaged in a conversation which kept her completely oblivious to the fact she was buying a $50 Dora the Explorer doll. She was talking about trips to Costa Rica while this ‘underling’ was trying to ring-up and bag a cart full of toys and other assorted Chinese-made crap. Her non-verbal communication spewed the feeling of distain this woman had for anybody making minimum wage, and it was very obvious that staying on her IPhone would mean she wouldn’t have to deal with anything or anybody she probably deemed below her.

It’s like being on a cell-phone puts a force-field of decency around the user, somehow it seems OK to almost dismiss the person standing in front of you, basically being on a cell-phone has become an acceptable excuse to be a dismissive ahole

But what bothered me more than even the pomposity of this master-servant role was the fact that because this lady was yapping on her phone, she held up the entire line and I was forced to stay in this Christmas-shopping hellhole for 5 minutes longer than I would have had to.