My overnight trip to NYC was very nice, thank you, and let's all lift a glass to the Captain and Haber* for their kind hospitality. However, I have got to get some portable music going for all these damn bus trips, or there is going to be some "Robot Slays Ten, Ruins Favorite Hoodie" action in the near future. People! In case you didn't hear me the first four million times: CELL PHONES ARE NOT APPROPRIATE BUS ENTERTAINMENT.
While I do not mind so much the "I'll be there in an hour, see you then" calls and have even made some myself, the Boston-to-New York express is not, in fact, the perfect time to catch everyone in your contacts list up on where you're going, where you were, what you were doing, and what the unending banal details of your life up till now have contained, especially when you seem to labor under the misapprehension that your phone represents a long tunnel through which you need to Shout! Your! Unbearable! Minutiae! in order to be heard by the other party. The beeping, tweeting, inane cacophany has got to stop. Where can I donate to the Buy a Moron a Book Fund?
On my trip back home, in addition to the usual contingent of idiots shouting, guffawing, dropping their phones and cursing, or just saying "What? What? WHAT?" every three seconds, there was someone who had set their ring-tone to some kind of WAOOW-WAOOW alarm sound. This was very, well, alarming because it sounded like maybe the bus was about to explode. However, I arrived safely as did my fellow passengers, both deserving and un-. And now I must seriously consider purchasing a discman or maybe an MP3 player, but why spend what is, to me, right now, a lot of money to buy some crap player when there is the iPod, for so much more money, the specter of which will make the purchase of any other player seem tainted, sad and inadequate? So now we're back to the relatively cheap discman idea, except now we've opened up the whole MP3 can of worms and how nice would it be not to have to carry discs around? So nice. Oh dear. Maybe it would be easier to just bring a kitchen knife on the bus with me.
*Nothing like the Captain and Tenille, really, except I'm pretty sure they have a Captain hat.
Posted by hilatron at October 18, 2004 01:56 PMConcord Trailways has a rule: no cellphone use. On the late bus back to Concord from Boston (you know, the one on which people often would like to SLEEP, you idiot with the metallic growth in your ear), I have been known to snarl and bark "No Cell Phones" at people.
Posted by: Doombot at October 18, 2004 06:16 PMMy two cents on the digital music conundrum: I bought myself a $100 mp3 player last month, and quickly learned it could only hold about 30 songs and couldn't play anything I downloaded on iTunes or RealAudio unless I burned them to a CD and then ripped them (an hour-long process for each CD). So I returned the thing and plan to invest in an iPod for Christmas. So yeah. Irresponsible phone people suck.
Posted by: EV at October 19, 2004 09:22 AMAnd OH MY GOD. Your server upgrade resulted in your comments REMEMBERING MY PERSONAL INFO. I am going to start planning what to do with that extra time.
Posted by: EV at October 19, 2004 09:22 AM