Friends Lunch Date

So, I'm sitting at lunch with a friend, we're having soup and salad Dutch-style. This lady and I try to take turns either treating each other or paying for our own lunches depending on how our economics are sitting at the time. We have known each other for about four years now, give or take. A mutual friend in the clergy introduced us when she moved to the area. She moved to the area probably a year after I did. He knew that we shared a mutual interest in Celtic Christianity and the Gaelic language, she, in fact, is a far-superior Gaelic speaker than I am and has taught me quite a lot. So we share these spiritual and cultural interests and are only about ten years apart in age. I may be old-fashioned, but I tend to think that people of a certain age grew up knowing certain things about manners that apply when you are at lunch or visiting with a friend you may not see but once or twice a month. The thing I am thinking of just now is that doggone cell phone and whether you take a call or not when at lunch with a friend. And I assumed that only younger people might not know this but this day at lunch made me think perhaps more people should hear this. Just because you have Bluetooth and a cell phone, does not mean that a ringing phone means you absolutely must answer a ringing phone when you are out with someone. Bluetooth or no, the person sitting across from you has now been cut off from you while sitting right across from you if you answer it. They are now isolated and alone. They are now left out of the conversation. If you are not being paid to answer that phone or waiting on some truly urgent call that absolutely must be answered, it would be far kinder to wait until you are not "with" that person. If you would only do [this] the kind thing, neither the other person in the room with you or on the other side of the phone can be the one feeling left out. No one, then, has to sit watching another conversation happening without them, while they eat their lunch alone.

A second thing about that technology is that, hey, those phones have off buttons, they have voicemail and just because it rings, that does not mean one is absolutely compelled to answer it. However, once one does answer that phone if you cannot resist this temptation, there is a way out of putting your friend through the pain of sitting in front of you while you have a conversation without them; all you have to do is tell the person on the other side that you would like to call them back in twenty or thirty minutes when you are done with lunch.

Okay, I know I blamed the technology and the truth is that it really isn't the nature of the cell phone that is the problem. The cell phone is the symptom. The cause obviously is the person holding the phone or plugged into the Bluetooth. And clearly, it is not just you young people. It is any person that forgets that the person in front of them is just as important as the person that is causing the phone to ring. I have more to say about the cell phone rudeness around us, but for now, I just wanted to focus on their presence at a lunch date. So, ladies and gents, think about maybe choosing how much that phone will be present or absent when you are out to eat with a friend. Are you going to "BE" in the room, conversing with each other, or are you willing to let the phone determine whether an absent party takes over the time with your friend, leaving someone out of the conversation?