July 8, 2005
Just a Minute, Boss. My Cellphone Is Ringing.
The workplace remains unsettled territory in the debate about cellphone etiquette, explains The New York Times.
Rebecca Hastings, from the Society for Human Resource Management, said: "Right now, cellphones are the cigarettes of this decade. It's an addiction. And just like cigarettes are banned from some places, so are cells banned. I think we'll see more organizations take a firmer line."
Office cell etiquette is still scattered partly because different people use the phone differently. Some people flaunt it at work to show how important they are. Others use it as an alternative communications network for the people they really want to talk to while the land line carries all the calls they want to screen out.
To an extent this is changing. As cells embed themselves deeper into people's lives, it is only natural that cellphone numbers have become less exclusive.
But this blurring of lines between business and personal use only makes cell use harder to regulate.
"Prior to the cellphone, the way we dressed communicated who we were in the workplace. Now, what ring tone someone has, how often the cellphone rings, how we respond to it when it rings. These are defining personality types in the office, which makes them harder to regulate than matters that aren't part of our bodies and psyches," commented Paul Levinson, author of "Cellphone: The Story of the World's Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything!".
In the absence of clear guidelines, the opportunities for abuse continue to expand. Optometrist Neil Gailmard said that two or three patients a day receive calls on their cellphones while he is treating them, despite a sign in his office asking them to turn their phones off. Dr. Gailmard is even more disturbed by doctors who take calls while seeing patients: "I think it's rude. But what actually happens in doctors' offices is very different from what should happen."
Devices like camera phones and BlackBerries are raising new questions about what is and isn't appropriate behavior at work.
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