December 7, 2005
Urinating while making a mobile-phone call
An entertaining piece wirtten by Stuart Jeffries for The Guardian, who ponders the merits of multitasking and recounts an incident involving a cell phone.
"It is one of the great lies of modern society that only women are good at multitasking. Consider what I saw in the gents last week. A man was urinating with one hand and making a mobile-phone call with the other. Lots of questions arise from this. Should he have told the person on the other end of the line what he was doing? Or should he have spared them? Could he do his flies up mid-call? How? Should he have washed his hands and then his mobile phone? Should I have frowned at him? Or applauded?"
... In their trenchant 2003 paper, Mobile Technologies and Boundaryless Spaces: Slavish Lifestyles, Seductive Meanderings, or Creative Empowerment?, two marketing professors, Nikhilesh Dholakia and Detlev Zwick, write: "According to the instrumental theory of technology, mobile technologies - what [Marshall] McLuhan refers to as electronic prostheses - promise opportunities for greater freedom, creativity, leisure and productivity by enhancing organic bodily functions."
Stuart Jeffries takse this to mean that you can go to the loo and remain in the loop.
Related article: - Flush cells in stalls
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