By Darragh Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 23, 2006; D01

Crazy?

Or cellphone?

It's the latest sidewalk game in the urban canyon:

On K Street, a guy in a tie screams at the air: "Who do you think you are?"

In Dupont Circle, a woman downing dainty bites of a muffin ponders, seemingly to no one, "Ummm, no." Then, more confidently, "No."

Outside the Capitol, a dapper suited young man circles a patch of sidewalk, stabs his pen at a notebook and jabbers whispered words to the ground.

Crazy?

Or cellphone?

Used to be that we knew immediately: The phones were, at first, way too big to miss. Then we learned to spot the subtler signs -- the hand cradled to the ear, the chiropractically problematic crook-necked shrug, the dark wire dangling down the chatterer's neck.

But now --

"Who are you talking to?" an older woman asks Vernal Hardy one day at Neiman Marcus. Inside the store's luxurious hush the noise of "crazy" is not only unacceptable but flat-out gauche. So the 26-year-old wearer of a wireless headset shows the woman the tiny apostrophe in his ear. It connects to his cellphone, and it's so itsy-bitsy it makes his watch face look like the moon on his wrist.

Of course, it employs Bluetooth, a short-range wireless technology that creates "personal area networks among your devices, and with other nearby devices," which sounds vaguely kinky, like a new little friend with benefits. With measurements in the millimeters, this is the latest cellphone gadget to change the ways we denigrate each other.

"You see people arguing, and it looks like he's schizophrenic!" begins bike messenger Jeff Combs, who finds himself moderately reassured when he can say, "Ohhhh. He's got one of those things on."

But some of the homeless denizens of Dupont, guys like forty-something Hank Myers, are less understanding and have dubbed anyone talking to the air, without cell or headset immediately apparent, as "not normal."

"I equate it with being homeless," Myers says, no matter that wireless headsets can cost upwards of $200 and some of those talking most outrageously can be wearing bespoke suits, silk ties and ostentatious cuff links.

This is not to say, though, that it's always easy to tell which is which in the game of Crazy? Or cellphone?

Across the park from Myers struts a debonair man, his gray tee tucked into belted jeans. He's swinging his sunglasses all jaunty and confident.

"All right," he's saying. "That's right." Like he's finishing up a business call and is about to spend the afternoon playing hooky. "Uh huh."

We walk toward him, armed with our anthropologist questions, then notice: There is no headset . He keeps talking, and somehow, it feels rude to interrupt. We back away.

The enthusiastic adopters know how they look. "You're an idiot" and "What's wrong with him?" were Ed Schneider's Bluetoothy judgments before he became one himself. The 44-year-old businessman is wearing his earpiece outside Gate A at Union Station and waiting for a train back home to Richmond. He's now addicted: "It's phenomenal," he says -- repeatedly. "I'm totally sold on it."

His wife, though? Can't stand it. She calls Schneider's oversized earring a "Star Wars-type thing," and she calls him "Spock."

Such Vulcanizing of the Bluetooth people is a common cut-down, and it's not always received politely. We thought the early days of cellphones were bad, with the still unsolved moral equation between the industrious converts -- I cannot live without it! -- and the pious holdouts -- So rude! So tacky! Who airs their personal business on public sidewalks?

"I'm never gonna do that! That's crazy ," 36-year-old Darius Carr promised himself, vowing to remain Bluetooth-free, until, not quite a month ago, he caved. He now wears his earpiece constantly, even at lunchtime over a mustardy hotdog eaten on a bench at Connecticut and Rhode Island avenues NW.

Confesses fanatic Frederic Roane, 48: "I've had several girlfriends tell me they don't like it."

"Like you're a robot," nods Stephen Robinson, 57, who has stopped to talk to Roane at Union Station because they're both wearing the same Plantronics wireless earpiece. He's in town from the Bay Area on business.

"It just looks like they're trying to be important," continues Roane, quoting his girlfriends.

"Yep, yep," Robinson agrees, then takes off his earpiece. Ooooo, get ready for some real intimacy now .

And yet, and yet, we find this all irresistible.

Last year, a scant 2 percent of Americans were "extremely familiar" with Bluetooth, this technology enabling the wireless headsets. This year, that number is 50 percent, a statistical skyrocket dubbed by market analyst Brian O'Rourke as "really shocking."

And there's more: In 2005, 33 million wireless earpieces were shipped worldwide, he says. This year's predicted number: 55 million.

This is our future. Before long, our little street game of Crazy? Or cellphone? will seem a quaint anachronism, like an old address book with no extra spaces for "e-mail" and "cellphone."

There's just this final glitch to work out: Discerning when, during conversations, a headsetted or earplugged someone is talking to you, or talking on the phone. This gets especially confusing because the contraption doesn't necessarily ring, and you can answer with your voice -- mumble, mumble, no fumbling with a phone required. So how do you tell when the conversational tides have shifted? Further complicating matters is this: There is no receiver to move back and forth, pulling it back toward the neck when they're talking to you, and perching it by their mouth when they're talking on the phone.

Take, as Exhibit A, this exchange between us and Roane and Robinson at Union Station, as they discuss life lived in Bluetooth:

"It's pretty good, pretty good," Roane says.

"I have the Motorola," Robinson says, adding something about "better reception."

"Hey," Roane says. "What's going on?"

(We do a double-take. Huh? Didn't we already say hello? Are you talkin' to me? But we play it cool and plow ahead with our next question.)

Do these two, who are wearing their identical headsets, often run into strangers who get all confused? So that even though Roane or Robinson is on the phone and talking to the headset, people think they're really talking to them ?

"Yeah," Robinson says. "People try to talk to you."

"Yeah," Roane says, nodding.

"Sometimes I might turn my head" -- Robinson says, turning so the earpiece is more visible -- "and let people know I'm not crazy."

"I'm working a double," Roane says into the air, before Robinson can finish, and though we understand this to refer to a work shift, it also seems a tidy parlance for talking out of both sides of the mouth, literally.

"We're in a new age of phone etiquette," Robinson says.

"Oh, yeah," Roane is saying, slightly off-kilter with the rest of the conversation. "We get along. We were roommates before."

At about that point, Roane's other conversation ends, whomever it was with, and he returns to us full time. But we have to admit, we're almost disappointed. Having his complete attention now seems like TV before cable, like watching early CNN before the additional news bits scrolled across the bottom-- like suddenly, this conversation has become way too simple, and something's missing.

What happens if we all decide we like our conversations kind of crazy?