By: Mordechai Schmutter

We’ve all been there.  We’re in line at the pizza shop, waiting for the person behind the counter to stop taking phone orders so that we, who actually dragged ourselves in and are standing right there, can order already.

“Why are you speaking to him first? I took the time to come down here!”

And the answer is that yes, you took the time to come down here.  You’re not about to go all the way back home just because of this.

“Well, where’s the food?” your wife is going to ask.

“Um, the guy was on the phone.”

So when the choice is waiting a couple of minutes or facing a hungry wife who expected you to be home earlier, you’re going to opt for waiting in line.

Also, restaurants have found that the person on the phone is more likely to know what he wants, whereas half the people in line in front of you don’t even bother looking at the menu until they get to the front of the line.  Nor have they figured out how many people are actually in their party.  And then they stare blankly at the menu and ask about things that aren’t on it.

It almost doesn’t pay to show up anywhere anymore.

We complain about this with stores and businesses, but we do it at home too.  The phone rings, say, during dinnertime, and we leap over the table to go look for it, no matter what else we have going on.  We don’t even know who’s calling yet.  I guess we’re assuming it’s the president, and he wants to give us money.  But even once we see the caller ID and realize it’s not important, we pick up the phone anyway, because once we ran around the house looking for the phone, we might as well say hello.

But what about the people around us, who are left waiting in silence?  Should they just sit there and eavesdrop?  It’s not really fun to eavesdrop when you can only hear one side of the conversation.

“No!… Well, that’s what I said…  No way!  And you just let him?…  That’s the funniest thing ever!”

“What is?”

“Sh.  I’m on the phone.”

And what are they supposed to do?  Say “excuse me”?  If someone is on the phone and you say excuse me, they generally will not stop yapping.  They’ve already forgotten they were talking to you.  They’re going to assume you meant the other kind of excuse me, and they’ll get out of your way, mostly to avoid all your impatient stares and the noise you’re making saying “excuse me.”  Just go past already!

“Excuse me” is too subtle.  It’s much easier, if you want to interrupt, to just call them.  It’s the ringing sound that gets people’s attention, I think.  If you made an annoying ringing sound in person, I bet they’d give you some attention as well.  But it might not be the attention you want.

So, for example, if you’re standing in line at the restaurant, it might be way more efficient to just call in an order, so that by the time you get to the front of the line and past all the people asking if they can get onion rings without the onions, your food will be ready.  That’s not making society better, but a guy has to eat.

I recently read about a restaurant in California that gives diners a 5% discount if they leave their phones at the counter.  I don’t think the restaurant is kosher.  But it might be worth it to go anyway, just to get in a conversation.

“Yes, we’re ready to order.  We’ll both have the soda.”

On the other hand, there are some people who do give priority to the person in front of them.  My wife has a friend who calls us, and when we pick up the phone, we have to wait a minute while she finishes up a conversation with someone in the background before she even says “hello”.  On the one hand, that’s great, and exactly what I’m talking about.  But on the other hand, she called us.

But the thing is that we know that our phones are driving a wedge.  According to recent studies, 13% of cell phone owners pretend to be using their phones in order to avoid interacting with people.  It could be more than that, but researchers couldn’t approach a lot of people, because they were on the phone.

So basically, we have people who are just walking down the street talking to themselves, instead of the people around them.  This is a great development for people like me, who actually DO talk to themselves, and now we don’t look as strange.  The only difference is that I’ve never ignored the person next to me because I had to finish what I was saying to myself.

There’s nothing like phones.  Not only to keep in touch with people who aren’t with us (lo aleinu?), but also to push away the people who are.  But the good news is that once we’ve pushed them away, we can talk to them on the phone.

By: Mordechai Schmutter

If everyone told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?

What if they didn’t even know you?

I’m referring, in particular, to the community-driven Q&A websites, such as “Askville”, “Answerbag”, and “Yahoo! Answers”.  These sites are a great way to get out all the things that you need to ask someone, such as:

-“HOW DO I TURN OFF MY CAPS LOCK BUTTON?”

-“Are there any islands left that haven’t been discovered?”

-“How do I get my credit card out of the disk drive?”

-“Why are there school?  Is a point to it?” and

-“I was bitten by a turtle when I was little.  Should I still drink orange juice?”

These are all real questions.  I’m sorry.

Considering how convenient the internet already makes things, Yahoo! Answers seems to be for people who already find the internet too inconvenient.  Google itself is great – you don’t even have to know how to spell.  It just asks, “Did you mean this?”

“Uh…  Yeah.”

But with Yahoo! Answers, you don’t even have to know how to Google.  Basically, it’s for people who only know how to look things up in the form of a question they can ask human beings.  These are the same people who can’t use a dictionary, because they don’t know how to look up the word “obtuse”; they have to look up, “What does obtuse mean?” and the W section doesn’t seem long enough.

Okay, so maybe your questions are good ones.  Maybe they’re things you can’t really Google, like specific personal advice questions.  Like, “How come whenever I forget something, it’s my fault, and when my wife forgets something, it’s my fault for not reminding her?”  I don’t think you can Google that.  But that doesn’t mean you should blindly follow the suggestions you get.

“Of course I can trust them,” people say.  “It’s Yahoo.  This isn’t some fly-by-night company.”

And it’s not.  But:

A. Yahoo doesn’t write the answers.  It’s kind of like saying, “Of course it’s safe to take the subway.  The MTA is a pretty big company.”

B. You can’t believe everything you read.  Not even everything you read in a newspaper is accurate, and those are people who get paid to write things and have a professional reputation to protect.  So even if something is a guess, it’s at least a guess that they hope is true.

But the people answering your questions have no motivation to give you the correct answer.  It’s not like this is a charity thing that they do in their spare time; that they’re so finished helping everyone around them that they’re looking for people on the internet they can help too.  You know how easy it is to write things on the internet?

It’s not even like Google, where you can look at the results and say, “Well, these people took the time to build an entire site devoted to this subject, so they must have some idea of what they’re talking about.”  These people stumbled across your question at 3 in the morning.  For them to go to Yahoo! Answers when they don’t even have a question (“How can I doctor a photo so that all my kids are looking at the camera?”), that means they basically used up everything else they can possibly look at on the internet, and your question is what’s left.  Or else they’re on the site to ask a question, and they noticed yours and decided to answer it. In which case, the people who are giving the answers are the same ones who were misspelling all those other questions.

Would you trust the opinion of someone you don’t know?  Probably.  We ask directions from random people on the street, and whatever the guy says, we believe him.  We don’t even try to get a second opinion.  And the guy doesn’t know us from Adam Harishon, but what he does know is that the quicker he spurts out an answer, the quicker we take him off the spot.  And even if he’s wrong, you’re never going to see him again anyway, especially if he gets you lost.

Okay, but Yahoo has a “best answer”, right?

Except that it’s not.  Users don’t always vote for the most helpful answer, they vote for the most entertaining answer.  For example, in the case of the CAPS LOCK question, the best answer chosen was, “IT’S FOREVER IRREVERSIBLE!  THE SAME THING HAPPENED TO ME!”  Alternatively, it’s voted in by the person who asked the question: “Am I right, or is my boss right?”

“Well, I’ll vote for the guy who says that I’m right.  Right?”

But you know how sometimes the best answer to someone’s question is not the answer they want to hear?  If you get to vote for your favorite answer, you’ll never hear what you don’t want to hear.  You’ll just hear what you wanted to do in the first place.

But you know all this.  You have no intention of taking whatever answer comes over the internet as the word of Hashem.  All you’re looking for is someone who will listen to your question.

Shouldn’t you have those people in real life?