#133 Speakerphone

I’ve never done well with speakerphones. My problem is I’m too quick to get into a conversation. I admit it’s a failing. Comes from being raised in a large and vocal family. Kind of like two of my other bad traits: I eat too quickly and reach across the table. Even though I came from a poor family, and even though I was the runt of the litter, I still had to compete for the choicest cuts of meatloaf. My parents both worked in a time when most kids had only one parent in the work force. Perhaps that’s why I have little sympathy for the rich people myth that poor people are poor because they’re lazy.
Anyhow, around our dinner table, it was eat quick or go hungry and it was talk quick or go unheard―or sometimes just get talked down. My older brother particularly, one and a half years my senior, would flash his winning smile to my dad, slide me a sidelong sneer, and then launch into whatever academic tit-bit he thought would impress all and sundry. My dad would respond with warmth and pride. When I tried to pipe up, old brother would elbow me in the shoulder and keep impressing. I learned to be both quick of tongue and quick of wit. Not to mention developing an elbow-resistant callous on my upper arm. Bringing on laughter silenced my older brother and for one brief moment, all the attention of the family universe was centered on me.
I guess that helps to explain my lifelong disdain for cellphones, even though the phones themselves have been around just a short portion of my life. It’s the interruption factor. Remember when speakerphones first came out? People would say you’re on speakerphone, and you’d start to talk and cut off your conversational partner or they’d cut you off because your voices couldn’t occupy the same electron pathway at the same time. Regular telephones have a wire for the incoming message going to the earpiece and a wire for the outgoing message coming from the microphone. Speakerphones, I guess because of feedback or something, don’t. An incoming word cuts off an outgoing word and vice versa. So you have to wait for the other guy to stop talking before you start. And every conversation begins to sound like dialogue in a movie or a bad episode of Dragnet. Not like the easy flowing speech of ordinary face-to-face, talk-over-under-and-through-your-partner conversation. Cellphones share the same disability. And that accounts for how they cause stilted speech and misunderstandings. Problem is, you can’t really tell when the guy on the other end starts to cut into what you’re saying. He doesn’t hear what you just said but you don’t know it because you keep talking. You just assume he got all of what you said.
So all I’m saying is. Let’s make sure that red phone in the oval office stays a landline. At least until we decide to sacrifice enough bandwidth so an incoming signal and an outgoing signal can be close enough to hit the same two phones but separate enough to get the whole conversation. Language and culture barriers are tough enough. Let’s not add cellphone crossover cutoff to the mix.
America, ya gotta love it.