Those of you who are enraged by excessive phone use might enjoy proposing a fiendish new game to your friends. A Californian blogger, sick of his friends spending meals engrossed in their phones, came up with this challenge: when a group sits down to eat, everyone has to place their mobile in a stack on the table. The first person to reach for their phone pays for the entire meal. If everyone gets through the meal without touching their phone, everyone just pays for themselves as standard.
Can you see your friends agreeing to take on this challenge? And does smartphone fiddling during meals get on your nerves? I don’t mind it too much, but hate when people take long calls when they’re in the company of others. However I have been reprimanded on occasion for my Twittering, so I don’t have a leg to stand on. What do you think?
Tuesday 24 January, 2012 at 11:19 am
Ah now, but what if you’re doing a review and you want a picture of the logcabin-stacked-rustic-fries?
Tuesday 24 January, 2012 at 11:23 am
Thank Lord, I’m not the only one to find mobile phones at meal time a nuisance. I don’t mind it if someone tells me at the begining of the meal that they are expecting an important call. But sharing a meal with people who pay more attention to their phones than the food (or the company), no thanks. You should stay at home and have a face to face meal (preferably some microwaved junk) with your phone. Is it that the conversation bores you to death? In that case, why go out with some friends? And why twitter your every moods and moves to people who are not at the meal? The more tools we have to communicate, the less we actually talk to people who are close to us, crazy isn’t it?
Tuesday 24 January, 2012 at 8:30 pm
Being miffed at your dinner date using their phone is one thing, but I was recently told off by a woman at another table for texting while dining with a friend. She had been tutting and rolling her eyes for ages, then commented loudly enough for everyone to hear: “Would you mind putting that away – it’s distracting and quite rude!” Happily the waiter softened her cough by asking her not to harass other customers. I said nothing but probably should have reminded her that A) some of us are on call for work 24/7 and don’t have the luxury of turning our phones off every time we see a friend and B) it’s no-one else’s beeswax!