Please. 

If you are leaving it, you want me to call you back.  In order to call you back, I need to capture the phone number and it takes several extra steps on my end to find it in my contacts if you are there at all. 

Oh, and yes, people still do use the voice calling features on their phones to communicate.

As I am not blessed with a brain that captures and catalogs all information heard once for instant retrieval, I am going to need to write it down.  I may get all the digits but want to make sure so repeating it for me again slowly will ensure I will call you back quickly and keeps me from having to listen to the entire voice mail again to get the number, hopefully.  This is especially true if you are not someone with whom I regularly communicate (ie, not in my contacts/saved numbers).

I always do this because I want to make it as easy as possible for people to call me back.  Try it out and see what you think especially if you are leaving a voice mail for me.

Every trip leads to a new story to tell. Some are horror stories about planes while others are about the people we encounter while moving about. I personally think airports are fascinating places to observe human behavior, identify trends, and witness how people actually use the gadgets and equipment they accumulate for a mobile life on the road.

That said, yesterday as I was waiting on a flight and browsing magazines in a kiosk, I encountered something I have seen time and again but this one really stood out.  A guy on a Bluetooth headset having a conversation so loud you couldn’t help but be included.  The only downside is that as a bystander you get one side of the conversation.

Needless to say, the loud and boisterous discussion played out in the store much to the dismay of the rest of us. The guy behind the counter starting shaking his head in disgust/dismay at this fella as he thumbed through a few magazines while demanding an unseen subordinate “get the income statement cleaned up blah blah blah and find him blah blah blah.”

Who knows if this guy was a poser or if he actually needed to be acting this way.  Regardless, I’m not sure it needed to play out in the store.

Now, we’ve all been "that guy/gal" who has had to be on the phone and be overheard, but as a rule I try to step away from people or even outside for a little privacy and to spare innocent bystanders of my one-sided gibberish.

I’m a fan of David Brooks of the NY Times and in one of his books (either Bobos in Paradise

or On Paradise Drive, I can’t remember which) he talks about how people spend more time telling the people they are talking to on the phone what they are doing vs. having a substantive conversation.

I think we’ve all heard this conversation before:

    …hey, yeah, just getting on a plane in [insert city or airport name] and trying to find my seat. Hang on a sec while I put my bag up and sit down…

    (or the past tense version of the previous)

People are funny.

And the addition of these little glowing headsets (which I don’t own….yet) make us even funnier. I am still an old school earbud and wire guy with my Blackberry which at least keeps me tethered to my device as I talk to an invisible person on the other end. Here’s a pretty good story from the Washington Post about a year ago that drives that point home.

I’m still trying to come up with something catchy to call this affliction – some good ones suggested to me include “Nocluetooth” or “Rudetooth” (thanks Shaun).