And I agree

I spotted this on Ned Hardy's aggregator blog. I don't know who first drew it, but, yeah:

I was taught, when I was a kid, that paying attention to someone was a form of respect. In class, in church, when someone is talking.

And yes, I understand: a certain percentage of the time you may be feigning respect. And okay, maybe that's not being "real" in the Real World sense....but it's more disruptive and rude to those around you to not be feigning respect. And sometimes a polite fiction keeps the world turning on its axis. I'd rather someone in my class, if they failed to see a reason for learning the stuff I was covering, pretend to pay attention than diddle on their phones, or worse, talk to a neighbor. And I HATE having to call people out for either of those things. It seems small but it saps my energy to do little confrontations like that.

I've had students, who made appointments to come see me, pull out their phone when it dings. Granted, sometimes you have to respond - your kid might be sick at school, it might be work needing you to come in because there's some problem. But in every case I saw, it was stuff like Facebook updates or stupid random texts and it irritated me. (I now have the policy, which I haven't had to enforce because it seems people have gotten a clue, that if you look at your phone for other than a true emergency while in a meeting with me, the meeting's over.)

I hold out hope that some of the really egregious misuses of cell phones will gradually drop out of sight as people get more accustomed to them and as there builds up some kind of a body of etiquette rules about the things. (The one I hate, other than the "Let me check this" for something meaningless while you are talking to someone, is the person who barrels through a grocery store, oblivious to the people jumping out of their way, as they talk on the phone. Or the students who barrel down the hall here, looking down at their phone to text. I've been nearly run into more than once....)

I don't know. Were there horrible breaches of etiquette when the first old landline phones came into houses? I know in my family we had a policy that if we were at the dinner table and the phone rang, well, too bad for whoever was calling - they'd just have to call back. (And that was even before answering machines were common in households....)