Trainsetting
You might call this a peeve, but the internet is so oversaturated with problems and yet so undersupplied with solutions that the time for “harmless complaining” is over. Shut the hell up. Smile.
If this were three years ago – which it’s not – my entry here might be a witty length of barb wire of an entry, a shiv of social commentary culled from a piece of driftwood I found on the beach and honed into a deadly weapon of chuckling hilariousness.
It might have started, then:
Cell phone rings piss me off. The more annoying they are, the longer it takes for their owner to answer his or her (not their) phone. I’m sometimes made more embarrassed than angry by these ringtones – “Aw, that middle-aged person has a MIDI of a song from his or her (not their) teenage years on their phone, that’s so adorable, only a tiny bit sad, mostly adorable, but even so why haven’t they picked up that phone yet???”
What’s really most annoying for me is the annoying cell phone ring on the train, when the cell phone is in the purse (always the purse, always at the very bottom) belonging to a woman traveler. It rings, it’s irritating, it keeps ringing because even when she unzips the bag it’s buried muffledly under various knick-knacks and then….
THE RINGTONE IS HEARD LOUD AND CRYSTAL CLEAR BY THE WHOLE CAR BECAUSE NOW IT’S OUT OF THE BAG AND STILL HASN’T BEEN ANSWERED YET.
Cell phone users everywhere, especially you passengers: pick up your phones. Put them on vibrate, or pick them up. Your pretending to be busy, in the other room of your apartment, on another call, blah blah, demeans you an infuriates your caller. Be kind, to them and to us. Fucking pick up.
Yeah, it might have turned out that way. It’s sort of funny, because it picks up on a subtle, off-beat aspect of modern human nature and turns it inside out to reveal all its insides, like a halved pepper. But it’s also not funny, because there are no real jokes in there. Style over content.
This time, I’m going the old-timey Dennis Miller approach, by offering an idealistic solution to the problem – specifically the train section – and rounding out this entry:
There are many ways to solve this train ringing problem, putting the phone on vibrate, on no ring at all, turning the phone off, having a Bluetooth…
I see two ways to remedy it if the phone is set to ring out loud.
1) Answer the phone in the purse. Then bring it out into the open air so that the ring doesn’t get twice as loud, because that’s the worst part, innit? When the ring is irritating, and then irritating as 200% of its power? And you know it’s coming, because that person hasn’t read this entry yet, because it’s only being written now. It’s awful, like I’ve heard Chinese water torture to be.
2) Use a new volume setting – that hasn’t been invented – wherein the volume of the ring will not maintain a volume, and not hardly increase in volume, but will rather decrease to half after two ring cycles, say 8 seconds or so. (I mention the increasing volume bit because I’ve been woken up by an alarm clock that started beeping at a pianissimo and built to two goddamn F’s so unscrupulously the poor machine deserved whatever I hit it with, I think it was a sandal.) This suggestion also requires the answerer to avoid my first solution, the easier one. But it’s one or the other, or it’s a rolled-up newspaper to the temple for that voyager over there.
This entry had all the bite of a gummy pirahna.
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