doc
Jul 16, 03, 1:01 pm
Sound, Fury and Cellphone Users
..."Passengers who choose to sit in the quiet car tell other passengers that it's the quiet car," an Amtrak spokesman, Dan Stessel, said. "It's self-policing."
Well, not always. Feelings of rage and seething are not uncommon when it comes to cellphones, where the "against" line up passionately against the "for." Few topics raise such ire as the penetration into private space that cellphone "yellers," "shouters," "brayers" and even "hooligans" — among the more generous descriptions foes use — inflict on fellow passengers. And when a cellphone addict cannot find a seat anywhere else and ignores the no cellphone rule on a quiet car, tempers can flare.
On the day of the confrontation on Mr. Garrett's train, the cellphone vigilante was at first unrepentant. It was the woman talking on the cellphone, he said, who was the transgressor. "I went to talk to him," the conductor recalled. "But he wasn't apologetic at all because she was in the quiet car. I told her she could complain at the next station. When we stopped, the police came on, and that cooled him off."
Even so, Mr. Garrett, a 30-year Amtrak veteran, does his best to uphold the rules. As the New York-bound train was leaving the Washington station earlier this month, he announced the quiet car's location and urged passengers sitting in it to "refrain from cellphone use or loud conversations..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/business/15CELL.html
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Will we have quiet aircraft too? http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum109/HTML/006775.html
..."Passengers who choose to sit in the quiet car tell other passengers that it's the quiet car," an Amtrak spokesman, Dan Stessel, said. "It's self-policing."
Well, not always. Feelings of rage and seething are not uncommon when it comes to cellphones, where the "against" line up passionately against the "for." Few topics raise such ire as the penetration into private space that cellphone "yellers," "shouters," "brayers" and even "hooligans" — among the more generous descriptions foes use — inflict on fellow passengers. And when a cellphone addict cannot find a seat anywhere else and ignores the no cellphone rule on a quiet car, tempers can flare.
On the day of the confrontation on Mr. Garrett's train, the cellphone vigilante was at first unrepentant. It was the woman talking on the cellphone, he said, who was the transgressor. "I went to talk to him," the conductor recalled. "But he wasn't apologetic at all because she was in the quiet car. I told her she could complain at the next station. When we stopped, the police came on, and that cooled him off."
Even so, Mr. Garrett, a 30-year Amtrak veteran, does his best to uphold the rules. As the New York-bound train was leaving the Washington station earlier this month, he announced the quiet car's location and urged passengers sitting in it to "refrain from cellphone use or loud conversations..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/business/15CELL.html
---
Will we have quiet aircraft too? http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum109/HTML/006775.html