- WASHINGTON (AP) - The bbrrrrring! during a play at Ford's Theatre wasn't
part of the script. It was a cellular phone call to a woman down front.
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- "Hello," the woman answered,
and to the audience's chagrin, kept on yakking. "Hang up!" a
child shouted. Instead, the woman got up and chatted all the way up the
aisle.
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- As the number of cell phone customers
in the United States has grown - it's now at 66 million - so has annoyance
at people who use their cell phones at movies, in restaurants, at the gym,
hair salons - even at church.
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- "It really is very thoughtless of
people," said etiquette doyen Letitia Baldridge. "It's just an
invasion of other people's privacy and quiet time. What's sad is that people
don't realize they are being rude."
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- And that's a manners no-no, etiquette
experts say.
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- Even when people talk on cell phones
in the privacy of their cars - which can be dangerous - it annoys etiquette
experts. Most of the incessant chatter is a status thing and could just
as easily take place on home or office phones, they say. But they do make
two exceptions: for emergencies and for brief calls to apologize if running
late.
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- A man in a Bethesda, Md., hair salon
was doing neither recently as he talked away while his hair was being washed
and cut, said Lynn McReynolds, a customer. "I felt sorry for the poor
woman trying to cut his hair," she said.
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- Baldridge was appalled when a man's cell
phone went off at church. But the priest saw it differently: "He said,
'I'd rather have that young man here on his cell than not attending."'
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- Nevertheless, people should turn off
their phones before entering churches, movie houses or restaurants, etiquette
experts say - or at the very least, excuse themselves and take the call
in the cloakroom, lobby or near public phones.
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- Dorothea Johnson of The Protocol School
of Washington said an outing with a friend at an upscale restaurant was
recently spoiled when a woman at the next table talked incessantly - and
loudly - on her phone.
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- Many other customers turned around and
glared, but that didn't stop the woman from taking two more calls. "There
was no regard whatsoever for anybody else in that room," Johnson says.
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- She suggests complaining to a waiter
or a theater usher rather than confronting the caller directly.
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- Baldridge offers different advice. "I
would lean over and whisper, 'Would you be terribly nice, incredibly kind
and finish that conversation so we can hear the play or the movie?' If
you just use a lot of sugar sweetness, you'll disarm the person."
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- Tom Whittington, who manages a Washington
movie theater, says that when customers complain about cell phone users,
managers will ask the person to stop.
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- "We have kids, it's a status kind
of thing," said Whittington. "Last year when we had the 'Star
Wars' trilogy, we had long lines and people were calling when they got
in the theater and said: 'Hey, I'm in the theater."'
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- In one case, though, moviegoers at a
different theater benefited from a man with a cell phone: When the film
was out of focus, he called management.
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- At gyms, fitness buffs chat on cell phones
while on treadmills, Stairmasters, even lifting weights.
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- "I don't know how important these
people really are, but they make themselves seem really important,"
said Petr Speight, program director for a Gold's Gym in Washington.
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- Even President Clinton is not immune.
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- Earlier this month, as he stood to give
his official toast at a White House state dinner for Argentine President
Carlos Menem, it happened: Bbrrrrring!
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