The Sound and the Fury

I presented comments from frustrated flight attendants and prickly passengers earlier this week who begged the Federal Communications Commission to scrap any plans it might have to lift its ban on in-flight cell phone use.

Before the commissioners make any ruling, they should think about how the big boss a few blocks uptown feels.

President Bush might like to listen to iPods, but his irritation with cell phone ringers is well known among the White House press corps. At a question-and-answer session earlier this week at the Oval Office with Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai, Bush lost no time in schooling the uninformed.

"Cell phone went off while the [prime minister] was speaking. The president stared straight ahead," wrote Ann McFeatters, a correspondent for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade who was in charge of filing the pool report for the other journalists. "Another cell phone went off in a second event later in the [Old Executive Office Building] and Bush later made a point of mentioning to an aide that he was irked. The aide told the sound technician with the offending device that cell phones not on vibrate are rude."

Other noisy technologies irk the commander-in-chief, as Julie Mason reported in the Houston Chronicle. The article centers on the tale of a wire correspondent's loosened tie, but also illustrates the president's attitude toward intrusive tweedles and beeps:

"Bush once famously needled Adam Entous of Reuters for entering the Oval Office with a loosened tie. 'You look fine today, Adam. The tie,' Bush told Entous, during a brief audience for reporters with the prime minister of the Netherlands. Bush, who rates sartorial lapses only slightly below pagers and cell phones going off during his speeches, was being sarcastic. He really didn't think the loose tie was fine. 'It's not as bad as a beeper violation. But it's getting close,' Bush said." (Thanks to Wonkette.com for highlighting these stories.)

Bush can't stand the ringtones, but for people unprotected from their neighbors by a wall of Secret Service agents, it's the talking that drives them nuts.

A survey out this week suggests that people are sick of cell phone conversations on the ground as well as six miles in the sky. No big surprise there, but what conversation! Almost half of a random online sample of about 1,200 Americans aged 18 to 69 reported overhearing things they would rather not have, and half of those conversations were about sex. Among the comments: "I heard a man having phone sex with his girlfriend" and "A man talking to his lover in the checkout line and making negative references about his wife."

The results come from Directions Research Inc., a marketing firm whose president, Randy Brooks, was inspired by a woman who sat next to him on an airplane.

"Quiet would have been welcome, but no such luck as each of the seven other passengers boarded with cell phone affixed to an ear," Brooks wrote in the pitch accompanying the survey. "While I can usually tune out these conversations, one stunned me. The woman in the seat next to me was discussing new product introductions planned by her company. Mind-blowing details of pricing, packaging and flavors -- the kind of stuff no firm wants competitors to know -- filled my ears. The reason I was stunned? My firm does all of the market research for her largest competitor."

Curious about what happened next, I called Brooks, who told me he that at first he said nothing. But he couldn't let her go on, he said. She looked annoyed, but when he told her whom he worked for, she thanked him for interrupting her. They didn't exchange another word for the rest of the flight.

Brooks says modern society needs CPR, or cell phone reform. According to the survey, the treatment is long overdue. Among the places people said they witnessed their use are churches, movies, behind the wheel, in business meetings at school functions and in sit-down restaurants. About 80 percent of the respondents said that cell phone users should turn off their juice in those locations or save them for emergencies -- whatever those are.