Convenience shouldn’t trump common courtesy

Dear Mar­i­ann: Last month, I was attend­ing Sun­day morn­ing church ser­vice. A man in the pew directly in front of me answered his ring­ing cell phone and rather than exit­ing the sanc­tu­ary to take the call, engaged in con­ver­sa­tion right there in his seat dur­ing the midst of the ser­mon. Your thoughts, please.

Mariann’s Response: A few weeks ago I wrote about the bound­ary vio­la­tions occur­ring with the onslaught of media and the now-concluded pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. The sit­u­a­tion you men­tion takes bound­ary issues to an entirely new level of “what next?” Is noth­ing sacred from the infringe­ment of elec­tron­ics, includ­ing church, espe­cially in the midst of the ser­mon? The only other sit­u­a­tions that I can think would merit equal scorn, is tak­ing both a call and con­vers­ing dur­ing a funeral or wed­ding. What has hap­pened to com­mon cour­tesy and deco­rum? It sad­dens me that tech­nol­ogy has become more impor­tant than our per­sonal inter­ac­tions and being able to make eye con­tact, con­verse in com­plete sen­tences, and not cause mishaps from tex­ting and dri­ving or mere walk­ing, due to pay­ing more atten­tion to our hand-held devices than our imme­di­ate sur­round­ings and other peo­ple in our presence.

While I am on the sub­ject, if you are an offender of tech­nol­ogy intru­sive­ness, espe­cially since Thanks­giv­ing is approach­ing, please give cour­tesy to the busy bank teller or gro­cery store clerk try­ing to cash your check or ring your pur­chases. Both of these ser­vice indus­try employ­ees are attempt­ing to wait on us, the pub­lic, and are usu­ally over­worked and under­paid. Can we not end our cel­lu­lar con­ver­sa­tion long enough to give them five min­utes or less of undi­vided atten­tion? Please be con­sid­er­ate to them.

Also, the usage of cel­lu­lar devices in other pub­lic places is per­plex­ing. When I use the women’s bath­room now, it amazes me how many of my gen­der come in talk­ing on their cel­lu­lar, go into a stall while con­tin­u­ing their dis­cus­sion, and then the con­ver­sa­tion keeps going “while going.” Is multi-tasking now nec­es­sary in the bath­room too? Do I really want to hear flush­ing if I am the per­son on the other end of the phone?

And finally, it is sur­pris­ing how many peo­ple work-out at a gym while simul­ta­ne­ously con­vers­ing on their cel­lu­lar. I guess I am not so tal­ented to man­age both with­out drop­ping a weight on my foot or achiev­ing only half of an upper-body work-out from hold­ing the cell­phone with one hand.

Pos­si­bly it is now impos­si­ble in our soci­ety to live with­out a con­stant “fix” of tech­nol­ogy. A favorite TV news show of mine, NBC’s, “Rock Cen­ter” had an inter­est­ing seg­ment on our per­sonal addic­tion to high-tech devices a week ago this past Thurs­day. The DSMIV (Diag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­ual), the “Bible” of men­tal health diag­no­sis codes, is con­sid­er­ing an addi­tion to their all-inclusive text that would address “tech­nol­ogy addic­tion” in the next edi­tion. Between tex­ting, email, Face­book, Linkedin, Tweet­ing, video games, and every­thing found on the Inter­net, I guess the inclu­sion of this clas­si­fi­ca­tion would be of no great surprise.

Carol O’Brien, Delaware County’s Pros­e­cut­ing Attor­ney is lead­ing a cam­paign to end “dis­tracted dri­ving’ in our area, espe­cially after sev­eral hor­rific acci­dents dur­ing the past year. The Ohio statewide man­date pro­hibit­ing tex­ting while dri­ving went into effect July 1, 2012. If caught, the first-time fine is $150 with a poten­tial 60-day license sus­pen­sion, which seems min­i­mal, but with higher penal­ties if dri­ver usage causes an acci­dent. Prior to the state man­date, Delaware joined such munic­i­pal­i­ties as Bex­ley, Colum­bus, Hilliard, New Albany and Wor­thing­ton in attempt­ing to instill a few bound­aries when using elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion devices. All I can say is, it’s about time.

Happy Thanks­giv­ing and please be cour­te­ous to cus­tomer ser­vice employ­ees try­ing to wait on us dur­ing this busy upcom­ing hol­i­day season.

Mar­i­ann Main is a licensed coun­selor and a Delaware native. Her col­umn appears weekly on Sat­ur­days. To sub­mit a ques­tion and have Mar­i­ann answer it anony­mously, visit delgazette.com/life-questions-with-local-answers or send mail to the Delaware Gazette office, 40 N. San­dusky St., suite 203, Delaware, OH 43015.

Posted by Mariann Main on Nov 17 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.