There's been some talk various places about cellphones and cellphone etiquette.

And here is one of the places where I admit to being an unabashed curmudgeon: I hate what cell phones are doing to manners and society. I will admit that they have the redeeming value of being useful in some emergencies, and a Godsend if your car breaks down in a dodgy neighborhood where all the pay phones are broken. (That said: given the advent of cell phones, how many pay phones have you seen lately? I wonder if people who are too poor or too Luddite to carry one are being subtly discriminated against).

I guess my number 1 rule for cell phones is this: if you wouldn't tell a complete stranger what you are planning to talk about on the cell phone, go somewhere totally private to do it. I can't tell you how many icky medical conversations I've heard one side of. Or how many screaming breakups I've been a party to, even though I didn't know either person involved. Or how many embarrassing "you're smoopy!....no, you're smoopy! My little smoopy!" conversations I've had to listen to.

It is as if people on a cell phone think there is a bubble around them. Or they think if other people don't like hearing the details of their gallbladder extraction or their hot night with that guy in Accounting, well, too darned bad.

There are some things that are supposed to be private for a reason.

That's one part of cell phone etiquette: you are not more special than other people and please have some consideration before you subject those around you to a long string of f-bombs, or a detailed discussion of what the doctor found in that particular orifice, or a sugar-shock-inducing sweetie-fest with your significant other.

Also, there's the noise and intrusion matter. I think, for me, the most maddening cell phone use - because it's so frinking unnecessary, in my eyes, is the person who slowly roams the Wal-Mart, reading off product names to the person on the other end of the phone. Or who is working their way up an aisle, reading off brands: "Is it Frosted-Mini-Wheats we get, or Wheat Squares with Frosting? And do we buy Kellogg's, General Mills, or the house brand?" If it is THAT important a particular brand be procured (and with frosted wheat squares it is: Kellogg's uses the evil sorbitol, which poisons us, and Post uses good old friendly sugar), then you WRITE DOWN the BRAND NAME on a piece of paper and tell the person to get that. If you or your significant other is too lazy to write a list (or too impatient to wait for one), I think you deserve whatever awful food the grocery shopper happens to pick up.

Or that could just me being Bitter Single Woman again, who has no one to shop for her, and has to go out and brave the cell-phone-idiots and the screaming children and the people who park their carts crosswise in the aisles to chat. But I've seen the no-list cell-phoner enough times for it to really annoy me. (And usually they're pretty oblivious; they tend to park their cart right in the middle of the aisle, or else block the entire milk section while they chat, or something. )

So I guess rule #2 is: Do not use the cell phone in place of something like a written list, if by your behavior you are likely to inconvenience/irritate other people around you. Again: you are not more special than other people. Doing something because it's a tiny bit more convenient for you is not right if it's going to annoy everyone around you.

Also on the "intrusion" issue: the ringtones. Dear God, the ringtones. My cellphone makes the little string of bloops that the factory programmed it to. If I were more technological and had the real desire to, I'd download the one that sounds like an old-fashioned real telephone ringing, because that amuses me. Likewise, I'd not be too bugged by a quacking duck (one of our conservation majors had that, IIRC). But it's the loud snippets of inappropriate music. Or the "Let me out of here! Let me out of here!" (coming from a phone in a lady's purse. It wasn't funny the first time I heard it). The worst though, which I have never heard (and pray I never do) is that there is apparently a ringtone that sounds like a woman in the throes of carnal ecstasy. Try explaining to your six year old why the gentleman's phone is doing THAT.

Rule #3: No lewd-n-rude ringtones. (I'd also prefer a "no loud music ringtones" but that may be going a bit far on the curmudgeon thing.)

Another part of cell phone etiquette for me is what I think of as the Hierarchy of Importance. Or at least, what it should be. Except in emergency* situations, the person you are with - regardless of whether they are a friend, a colleague, a student, a teacher, the checkout lady at the grocery store, the receptionist at the doctor's office - is MORE important than the person calling you on the phone. The person on the phone should wait. And if you are going up to someone - like a checkout person or the receptionist - you should END your conversation before you come to them. And that goes double if there is a line. Do not make the person who is already fuming behind you in line wait even longer while you continue to chat and then fumble with your change purse or whatever. (There should be a "holding pen" at grocery stores where people talking on the cell phone have to go to finish their conversations before they check out. It's just rude to the checker. It's like saying "I consider you less than a person, so I will ignore your presence")

(*Emergency: your wife is going into labor. A beloved family member is coming out of life-threatening surgery. Your child is missing. You are the on-call person at a likely-to-be-burglarized place of work and a phone call means that the cops are on their way to write a theft report).

I realize that you can't always tell "emergency" right when the phone rings, but I think 85% of the people also kind of know when they are and are not in potential "emergency" situations.

I think I wrote once before about the LAST time I ever bought my Clinique products at the Dillard's here - the young "lady" who was manning the counter was having a hot 'n' heavy convo with her boyfriend (or her girlfriend, let's be inclusive here) and she DIDN'T EVEN LOOK UP when I was checking out other than to put a hand over the mouthpiece and mumble "$16.50" at me. No "thank you," no "may I help you," no "let me put this on hold." Obviously her scrump-bunny* was more important than her job at that point. (No, I didn't go looking for a manager. I was too steamed and besides I was in a hurry to get out of there and get home.)

(*scrump-bunny. Heh. I don't know where that originated but we used to use it when I was in grad school to describe - well, to describe an attractive person that you, um, "scrumped" with, but didn't think of as marriage material, usually because of a lack of intellect on their part (hence the "bunny"). My friends and I generally thought of both the scrumper and the scrumpee as being somewhat contemptible.)

Rule #4: Except in emergencies, the person standing in front of you is more deserving of your attention - WHETHER YOU THINK SO OR NOT - than the person on the phone. Politeness means sometimes restraining your most basic desires - like, I would SO much rather talk to my boyfriend than to this boring person I am eating lunch with - in the name of not hurting the other person's feelings.

I also have to give a word to the phones-ringing-in-inappropriate-places. Yes, yes, I know you can turn them off. Then why do so few people do that? I have heard cell phones ring in church. I have heard them ring in movies, at classical concerts, in the library. I have heard of them ringing at funerals. And the last time I travelled coach on the train - the emergency trip at Thanksgiving when my dad was having a heart catheterization and I was already worried & sad & hadn't slept well for three days - there were SO MANY PEOPLE who FAILED to turn their cell phones off. There is nothing like hearing an electronic version of "Guantanamera" or whatever damned ringtone someone has at 2 am on a train when you are trying to sleep.

Rule #5: Put the danged thing on "silent mode." (I'd like to see cell phones come out with little electrodes, say, that you could wire to your hip, and it would give you a teeny tiny pulse - not an electric shock, nothing painful - but like a little "poke" to say "hey, someone's calling you!" And I'd like that to be the default mode on phones.)

They should put timers on the things - so you can set them to "go to sleep" at, say, 9 pm, and "wake up" at 9 am. Because, if you're traveling on a public conveyance overnight? You almost certainly do not need to receive a phone call at 3 am. Even if someone is dying - it's not going to get you to your destination any faster.

(One way in which my friends claim that "although you're a Yankee, you're stereotypically Southern": I do not call people between the hours of, say, 8 pm and 9 am. It's just not right. Getting a call late at night, to me, always means bad news. And I'm annoyed when someone calls me at 11 pm to just pass on a piece of information they forgot about: why not just call me next morning, instead of shocking me out of sleep?)

Rule #6: Do not call someone at what is generally recognized as an inconvenient time (mealtimes, late late late at night) just because you can. Especially not to do the "Guess where I am!" game. That gets you hung up on, in my world.

Lynn writes on her blog about how turning the phone off - even for a reason generally agreed upon as legitimate - causes people to complain that she "never turns on her cell phone." Well, too danged bad, would be my response to those people. I don't have many luxuries in my life but one of them is that I am NOT reachable 24/7. And I like it that way. (My friends know that I almost never turn my cell phone ON to receive calls, unless it's a real emergency situation. And I have voice-mail at home, so I eventually get messages.)

Seriously? I would be willing to bet in the future that the REAL status is not carrying the lightest, slimmest, fanciest cell phone - it will be being the kind of person who can get away, who doesn't have to be intruded upon at all times.

Oh, and on the camera cell phones. I quote a colleague and good friend here, in the course of one of our regular, "what is the world coming to" conversations:

Me: And those camera cell phones. Who needs a camera on their cell phone?
Him: (without missing a beat) Pervs.

(I laughed at that. I know, not everyone who has a camera cell phone and uses it is a perv. But there are enough cases of people getting beat up for taking "upskirt photos" or people being fired for photographing their co-workers in the locker room, that I am inclined to somewhat agree with my colleague).