Generation Smartphone?

Today, I thought I’d start with the very end of this post. Why should we accurately follow chronology, anyways? And this is the reason why I’m doing this:

My head is a box filled with nothing…
                   Ben Lee, “Catch my Disease”

I had this song stuck in my head for days now… Why? It couldn’t be less obvious: I was basically forced to listen to it! Recently, Catch my Disease became my favorite song. What I call “my favorite song” changes almost weekly. I mean, there’s always this one song that you reallyreally like and you keep listening to it until you can’t hear it anymore, right? What makes this song so striking is it’s first line and the main reason why I was listening to music rather than reading…
So last week I was sitting in the train and the same thing happened to me every single day! I’m taking out the text that I want to read, get a marker and a pen and basically start reading before the train even leaves the station. Last week, however, there was always something interrupting me. Fortunately, there were no ladies sitting right behind me and talking for an hour. This time, it was much worse…

At first, there was this woman who got phone calls every two minutes. I am not exaggerating! Side note: I’m riding first class so I can study because it usually is super quiet in there. Back to the busy lady: One could observe that she was not one of the business people who travel first. Not only did her appearance tell me, but also the phone calls she made. Like many people, she apparently did not get that you don’t have to speak up while talking on the phone. Seriously, the guy at the other end can hear you perfectly fine even if you keep it down. First, she was talking to her son; afterwards, she was fixing appointments for her son; and then there was either a co-worker calling her or somebody who had to fix something in her house. It was more than just three calls, of course.
Pretty much the same happened on all the other rides I was taking. People were either talking super loud or their phones were ringing like crazy.

I am in my mid-twenties and the papers and TV refer to my generation and the one after us as “Generation Smartphone”. Yes, we basically were born holding a cell phone. We know how to handle those things and couldn’t possibly live without them (even if we won’t admit it). But then there are the others: those who just don’t know how to handle a cell but own one because everybody else has one and they have to be connected because of work.
I think there should be certain rules when it comes to smartphone-handling so we can live in a world that’s a little more quiet:

1. When in a public building, bus, train, metro, etc. set your phone on “silent”. Nobody wants to hear your cell ringing all the time. There is a reason why they invented “vibrate”.
2. Turn off the audible touch tones. Really annoying if one’s typing a whole email on the phone.
3. Talk in regular voice. You don’t have to speak up when you’re talking on the phone. Even if the person at the other end of the line is miles away, the can hear you just fine. You might have observed cab drivers whispering into their phone. I bet whoever’s on the line can hear him. (I always wonder what they’re saying…)

That were my three golden rules when it comes to using a cell phone in public. I should add the one that says “Don’t use your cell while I’m talking to you”. I think all of those rules should be part of one’s manners, but apparently not everybody has adapted them so far. Until then, I’ll put on my earphones and listen to Ben Lee, ’cause that’s the way I like it.

Am I the only one who’s disturbed by people who use cell phones all the time? And are there any rules one could add? Do you have a similar story to share?

Happy NaBloPoMo!!

Apparently, there is such a thing as the National Blog Post Month… Did I get that right? 🙂
What a great opportunity to spam the world with a few words before it’s time to go to sleep.

Because it’s the blogger’s month, I thought I’ll share some thoughts I always had about blogging. At least the ones that come to mind at this late hour.

Some people, like me, blog without a reason and spam the www with… well, you’ll find your own word for this. 😉 Fair ’nuff, I’d say. Others think they do have a reason to blog, but somehow this reason is not entirely obvious for the rest of the world. And then there are those people who actually have something to share – I mean important and intelligent thoughts – but they just get lost in the big ocean of the world wide blog-web.

Additionally, there’s an almost infinite amount of topics out there that people write about. Some useful, others senseless… Personally, I’m a major fan of all baking-related blogs. As a bookworm, I love reading about books and other people’s opinions about books. The blogworld is the place where I find suggestions for new books, or I might get a review about a book I didn’t really want to read, but then this review was so tremendously well written that I just had to put that book on my to-read-list. Also, somebody might be able to entirely change the idea I had about a book and therefore helps me seeing things from another angle.
What I still have mixed feelings about are photo-blogs. I mean, I love looking at pictures, and there are some really talented photographers out there, don’t get me wrong! But sometimes there are just too many photos in one single post, so it tends to get kind of exhausting to look at all of them and to soak up all those impressions.

Sometimes, less is more… And that’s why I’m saying good night, world.

Why do you blog? And why do you like reading blogs? How many people out there write for a cause, and how many just out of boredom or because the procrastination-monster hit them again?