There’s a couple of posts at TechDirt – not linking to them, find them if you will – that are just this side of trolling – on the subject of allowing the use of mobile phones on planes. Basically pointing at opponents sniggering and saying, those safety excuses are just a pretext, what you are really about is the annoyance factor.

Damn right!

Most of the comments on both posts are done by people with a very US-centric viewpoint, and quite a few of them start with “I don’t fly [often], but…” or mention things like “long flights, 3 hours or more”. Dudes… Really. I fly regularly to Korea, 11+ hours. The thought of having a planeload of Koreans yakking on the bloody plane for 10+ hours – 300 people, well distributed over 10 hours, can surely make your life a permanent misery. People who’ve travelled on KAL, Asiana, or any “foreign” airline shlepping Koreans around the planet know how loud they can be. And such people have heard the domino-like noise of 300+ mobile phones being flipped open as soon as the wheels touched the tarmac. And the ensuing 300 “Yoboseyo!”.

And then of course there’s our classic [wannabe] Parisian, the same who had a major fit when they prohibited smoking on flights – Air France being the last “civilized” airline to do so, after “friendly” pressure of its American partner in the SkyTeam alliance. Yeah, that dude or dudine who’ll stay riveted to their bluetooth piece until the plane’s doors close, and only after prodding from the stews. BlueTooth didn’t make conversations quieter, as a commentor said at TechDirt, but quite louder. And part of the hip factor, which compounds the number of unneeded phone calls. Ever been into an airport lounge? Hundreds of people all making phone calls, seemingly? You sure you want to reproduce this inside a plane?

No, I don’t want to be disturbed on a 10+ hour flight by discussions, either over the waves or across aisles. Or kids kicking my seat for the whole flight – at least one kid learned his lesson, some months ago. There are just so many hours you can sleep on a flight – 6/7 on SEL-CDG for me – and the rest of them, I’d like to spend them in an environment as quiet as possible. Yes, quiet is a right. All those wankers protesting that forbidding phone calls on planes deprive them of a right really don’t want to look at the other side of the medal: our right to ride that gahdfershaken aluminium cigar in peace. Really.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 2nd, 2006 at 1:51 am and is filed under Brain fart of the day, All you freak are belong to you. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.