Should I turn this off?

What is cell phone etiquette?

So, I’m sitting in a farmer’s association meeting last week.

It wasn’t the most interesting meeting of all time. The secretary was reading through the thirty-nine clauses of the organizations constitution, but a necessary meeting nonetheless.

I’m sitting there, trying to pick up what he’s saying but he’s talking quite rapidly, plus I don’t know if they have ever heard of the term acoustics before.

Either way, about an hour into the meeting, I hear an operator’s voice say “The time is 11:43.”

So I turn around to see what’s going on. It turns out a guy sitting two rows back had to reset the time on his phone. And instead of asking his neighbor for the hour, he decided to call the “what time is it?” hotline — on speakerphone.

So as you can tell, people down here use and answer their cell phones in all situation.

In the high schools, the kids are calling and texting during class. Or they have the earphones in their ears and are listening to music. I gave them the John U. Bacon hammer to the ringing cell phone story and frightened them sufficiently — especially because I had a hammer in my backpack (for a community garden but I guess you could say that it served a few purposes).

So, this has taken some getting used to.