If Not Now When?

Was probably the question the well mannered audience members were asking themselves last Tuesday in Avery Fisher Hall in New York City.   According to the WSJ's story here, a cell phone in the front row of the theater began ringing (playing?) the Marimba during Mahler's Nineth.   After many minutes, the conductor reportedly stopped the piece, turned and asked that the phone be turned off.  Yet the phone (believed to be an alarm) continued.  After many minutes of total silence in the hall broken only by jeers from other attendees and repeated requests from the conductor, the offender finally silenced the phone.  The Philharmonic began at the top.  

Perhaps the patron was elderly, hard of hearing and did not realize his alarm was going off.  Had he set himself a reminder to go to the Philharmonic?  Possibly, he is a large supporter of the Symphony and has a great deal of clout and that is why ushers never approached to "help" him or escort him and his phone out of the hall.  

As a friend mentioned earlier this week, it does seem these days, that more and more people behave (although we do not know if this particular offense was intentional) as though the rules do not apply to them.  Whether these are rules of common courtesy or  rules of law, many people behave as if those rules are for others.  Have you noticed this?  What do you think?

Could this be why the Chinese are throwing eggs at Apple stores and Apple cancelled the launch of the iphone4S in China?

Enjoy the long weekend.

Image from PSD

Letting Your Child Make the Call

Circa 1980, when a child complained, “I’m bored” a mother could suggest, “Well, why don’t you pick up the phone and call Mary?” And the child might actually pick up the phone, dial, and say something like, “Hello, this is Lisa. May I please speak to Mary? … Mary, would you like to come over and play this afternoon?” Hard to imagine in this day and age, but having heard her mother make countless invitations and other social arrangements by phone, this child of 1980 might indeed pull this behavior off. And many of us did.

Fast forward to now, 2011. Mary is probably off at her advanced Chinese tutorial, math boot camp, or her daily elite fencing team practice, but suppose Mary were home, what would today’s mother say?  Would our children make such a phone call? Do they even know how to dial a telephone?

With shifting technology and the ascendancy of social media, our own adult social lives have become largely invisible to our children. Adults don’t use the phone for socializing, so our children have only rarely overheard an invitation extended, accepted, or politely declined. Instead, they see us tapping away at our iphones and blackberrys to make play dates, dinner dates, all manner of social plans. Since they’re not reading over our shoulders, they have no idea what we’re saying and how we’re saying it.  There is little wonder, then, at the chaos that can erupt when children begin to chat, IM, text, or email. They have no idea what they are doing!

So really, its up to us, isn’t it? It’s up to us to teach them to make the call, to engage a friend over the phone, to begin to manage their own social lives. Some might argue that telephone use is becoming obsolete and the ability to communicate effectively and civilly by email, text, social media will be far more valuable in their adult lives. Probably true. But think of the phone as training wheels for those other modes of communication: helping them use the phone allows us to easily listen in, provide a few hints and nudges. Supervised interaction. They can and will move on. At the very least, phone manners will be more useful than the cursive, ball room dancing, or horseback riding, that many of us are already willing to encourage.

* image from "How Telephones Work" on HowStuffWorks.com