Parnel, you wouldn't happen to be one of those guys that "beams" us all into your office as soon as you get into an airport lounge would you?

I read this article a while back in the International Herald Tribune. I liked it so much I kept it. Here it is for anyone who's interested:

Speak softly or I'll hit you with a big stick
By Richard Cohen
Friday, April 26, 2002

WASHINGTON: As I sit in an airport lounge, a very loud voice snaps me awake from a drowsy state. It's some guy on a cell phone. He's setting up meetings, making appointments and God only knows whom he's talking to, as it is not yet 7 a.m. on the East Coast. The lounge is empty, but we few, we noble few, marshal our collective eyeballs and just stare in rebuke. Nothing. A volcanic force builds within me. "Louder," I erupt. "We can't hear you."
The man rises from his seat. He keeps rising and rising, taking forever to reach his full height of precisely 8-foot-4. "You got a problem?" he says.
All eyes are on me now. I am heading to California for a meeting, interloping in the first-class lounge on account of an upgrade, but it's always the schoolyard to me. I cannot back down. I pitch my voice low. "You're too loud," I say. I point to where the phones are. "Go over there." To my utter surprise, he does.
Virtual applause fills the room, and as we all file out to our planes, I am repeatedly thanked for my heroism. I would call it high school all over again, but in truth I never had such a good day in high school.
But this incident - a brush with death, in my telling - did not teach me a lesson. Months later I was on a bus, and a young man was talking loudly on his cell phone. He was making plans for the evening - who would meet whom and where. It was a tedious, boring conversation, and I feel, against all expectation, that if you must talk loudly, you have a minimal obligation to be interesting. This guy was not, and so, pressing my luck, I told him to pipe down.
"!$&#!," he replied. And then turning back to his phone he described how some (expletive) was complaining about his use of the cell phone.
Hormones I had not felt in years coursed through my body. I went to battle stations, but, inexplicably, the jerk snapped his phone closed and turned his back on me. I expected the usual round of applause, but I heard nothing. I did make eye contact with a young woman who, I was sure, thought me her hero. But instead of praise, I got criticism. The bus was "a public space," she said, and the jerk was entitled to use it as he saw fit. I was flabbergasted.
How wrong can you be? It was precisely because the bus was a public space that the caller had an obligation not to impose his conversation on us. If he were at home, he could talk as loudly as he wished - and no one would care. But by talking loudly on the bus - this is called "cell yell" - he was, in effect, "privatizing the public space," a phrase, my diligent research tells me, once used by Timo Kopomaa, a Finnish social scientist. The caller had, in effect, expropriated the public space for his own use.
This is a form of theft - and you don't have to be a bus rider to be victimized. You are victimized when you are walking down the street and you get sonically mugged by some car that's little more than a boombox on wheels. Or when you pass some store that drizzles tinny music over you.
You're victimized when such a car overtakes your own and its music overwhelms whatever sweet air or minuet happens to be emanating from your own speakers. That driver has taken over not only the public space but also the private one you maintain in your car. He has even chosen your music for you.
It says somewhere in my research that young people see the cell phone as something to flaunt - something having to do with sex and virility. I concur. In my experience, young people seem inordinately willing to share their personal lives with anyone who happens to be within earshot. If this is indeed a youth thing, then the future looks bleak. They are, as every politician tells us, the future.
Twice now, I have put my life on the line in the name of keeping our public space public. Sooner or later, though, I fear some goon will invade my space with his fist, ending my career as a crusader for silence. If and when that happens, I want the world to recognize my struggle and to say something nice about me. Just, please, say it softly.

The Washington Post