Mental Illness?

It’s always sad to see some animated person standing on a street corner waving and hollering to passing cars. You instantly recognize them as having some sort of mental handicap that has gone untreated, a reminder of the thousands of the people in this world who are in serious need of psychological help but cannot afford it.

But these days, this condition seems to be infecting people in all walks of life, not just the poor and homeless. Last week I witnessed a well-dressed woman walking through our local shopping mall alone, gesturing and talking loudly to no one in particular. Then yesterday while in line at Starbucks, a nice looking young man in front of me was carrying on an entire conversation with his imaginary friend. He even interrupted his conversation to order his coffee, and then continued on with it as he waited for them to prepare it. It was fascinating that this guy could switch so easily between two worlds, able to interact with the Starbucks clerk very appropriately, and then immediately switching back into his fantasy world to resume his conversation with himself.

Of course you know what happened next, he turned around revealing alien Bluetooth hardware growing out of his left ear. Some would say that this makes the whole thing ok, since he was actually talking to his girlfriend on his cellphone and not his inner demons. But is it really ok?

If everyone wore this Borg prosthesis on the side of their faces, how unnerving would that be? Lets say you’re talking to a friend and all of a sudden they wave you off and start a conversation with someone a hundred miles away. No ringing cellphone, nothing; he just stops listening to you. How rude is that?

It's akin to the situation where you’re paying for something at a store when the phone rings and the clerk spends several minutes answering the caller’s question instead of finishing with your transaction. Why does the person on the phone get to jump to the front of the line? Why should a cellphone conversation take priority over a real-life face-to-face conversation? Or maybe you’re sitting in the car talking and you realize that your friend hasn’t been listening to a word you’ve been saying; he’s been checking his voice mail!

Cellphones can be a wonderful adjunct to our daily lives, but common courtesy seems to have been lost in the process. People need to be reminded that a ringing telephone is not a national emergency and that the fact that they have been called in the middle of lunch doesn’t necessarily make them important. As these Bluetooth headsets get smaller and smaller to the point where they become nearly invisible, a whole new social protocol will need to be developed; in fact it’s overdue.

As wireless technology insinuates itself into every aspect of our lives, the person standing outside alone talking and gesturing into space is going to become a common sight, causing no one to notice. This doesn’t bode well for the poor guy yelling on the street corner who has no cellphone but thinks he does.
How is he going to get noticed?