STFU Already

I admit it: there’s no more hackneyed rant imaginable and not a single dead horse more beaten than this one; however, my defense is that the very behavior against which I’m inveighing is equally clichéd, and so—in the hope that two wrongs may cancel each other out—I’m launching this diatribe, fully aware that the point’s already been made ad nauseum but still convinced one more polemic, to wit, this one, is in order.

I rail against, of course, loudmouthed cell phone users in public spaces, especially public transit. It continues to amaze and astound me how often I’m subjected to some pitiful fool on his or her mobile telephone yakking away loud enough for anyone in the general vicinity to eavesdrop on the usually banal, but often rather private details of the life he or she is unfortunate enough to be living.

In the past week, for instance, as I’ve ridden either buses in Seattle or the BART train in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve had to put up with: a young woman going into great detail about how unqualified her supervisor at Starbucks is; a 20-something boy trying for 15 minutes to cadge money from his mom; a single mother complaining about her loser boyfriend who never plays with her daughter; some wannabe hip-hop dude bragging about his plans for a wild weekend in the City; a businessman chewing out his secretary for not passing on some message to him; and a teenage girl who I couldn’t really understand, but who used the word “like” at least twice in every sentence.

Now, of course, I should hardly talk about lack of decorum when it comes to sharing the minutia of one’s life with the world; but the difference is that readers of this blog choose to subject themselves to it, whereas when I’m being bombarded by cell phone conversations, I’ve got no say in the matter.

Plus, unlike those chatterboxes, I stop at 327 words.