If you're on your phone, we don't want to interrupt, so we'll just help everyone behind you first.
This message is posted at Muddy Waters Coffee Co., Seattle, Wash., according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which also noted that Bizzarro Italian Cafe has a $5 cell phone "surcharge" on its menu. The P-I article ran two days after my column in Shelf Awareness last week, so perhaps something is in the air(waves).
Certainly
e-mail responses were plentiful. No one called my mobile phone, though
Melville House Publishing's Dennis Johnson admitted that "I was going
to call you on your cell to say thanks but, well, I thought you might
be in the store. . . ," and Susan Weis of breathe books, Baltimore,
Md., considered waiting "until I got to my store and call you from my
cell to tell you how much I enjoyed today's column . . . but I thought
I'd email instead!"
Weis has mixed feelings about cell use.
She posts signs, but "no one sees them. I have noticed, though, that
once in a while people are actually telling the other person what they
are doing and what they are reading. I remember feeling liked I'd
'arrived' when I heard someone tell their phone friend, 'I'm at
breathe.' That was it--no breathe books, or at the bookstore in
Hampden--just breathe! That was kind of thrilling for me."
At
University Book Store, Bellevue, Wash., David Henkes has observed a
societal shift: "It does seem people have forgotten how quiet,
respectful, and unassuming they used to be when tethered to a phone
cord at a public pay phone. Etiquette and common sense have definitely
been tossed aside. I have heard people dispense personal
information--credit card numbers, addresses, etc.--while roaming the
aisles."
Sue Gazell, noting that Bookman, Nashville, Tenn., is
near Vanderbilt University and Hospital, shared her favorite cell
horror story, about a "pediatrician who, on her lunch hour, came in to
shop for audiobooks. She was carrying her lunch and beverage. Her cell
phone rang, and she answered. It was a business call. She set up office
right there in the store--pulled up a chair, set her lunch and beverage
on a stack of books and proceeded to talk about a patient's private
case for about 20 minutes, loudly enough so all in the store could
hear."
A "stroke of serendipitous beneficence" envelops Valerie
Ryan's Cannon Beach Book Company, Cannon Beach, Ore., where "no cell
phone receives a signal. Are we lead-lined? When some obnox starts the
escalation from 'can you hear me?' to 'CAN YOU HEAR ME?' I smile
sweetly (!) and say, 'There is no signal inside the store, but the
porch seems to work for most phones.'"
Jean Westcott,
senior marketing and publicity manager for International Publishers
Marketing, offered historical perspective from her "heady days of
pre-Internet crash" bookselling at Olsson's bookstore, Arlington, Va.:
"It was hard to work in a bookstore in the late '90s and not feel like
a big chump for not grabbing a job in the Intelligent Economy and
trying to earn some of the fabled stock options." Watching 22-year-olds
being interviewed over their cell phones for dream jobs was bad, but
even worse were the ones doing so while "sitting in the computer books
section faking their way through their phone interviews by thumbing
through books on web development."
For international
perspective, Sarah Knight of the Northshire Bookstore, Manchester, Vt.,
has just returned from Tokyo, "where it is considered extremely rude to
talk on a cell phone in public (text messaging is of course done and is
okay). The few people I did see talking on phones would first walk down
an alley and use the phone there and only briefly."
Michael
Walsh, a Johns Hopkins University Press sales rep and publisher of Old
Earth Books, sent a "blast from the past" in the form of a dialogue
snippet from Space Cadet by Robert A. Heinlein, published in
1948. When Jarman says "your telephone is sounding," Matt takes a phone
out of his pouch, has a brief conversation with his father and ends by
saying, "Sure, sure, Dad. I'll have to sign off--I'm in a crowd.
Good-bye. Thanks for calling.'"
Prescience points for the
phone, if not the etiquette. Or as Walsh observes, "Sometimes SF gets
it right, and sometimes almost . . ."
I'm typing this in a bookstore café. My car is being repaired next door and the garage will call soon. I'm in a crowd, but I'll have to answer my cell. I'll be one of them.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)