There’s a Special Place in Hell for Speakerphone People

Okay, time to get controversial.

I think.

I'm sitting here having breakfast this morning. It's our last day at the hotel, and we roll back to Santa Fe today. I'm trying to eat my fucking breakfast in peace. I'm really fucking trying.

I dish up my plate, pour my coffee, and sit the fuck down. Fork in hand. iPad open in front of me. I'm trying to block out the noise around me so I can concentrate on the thoughts in my head, but there's this incredibly fucking annoying conversation coming from behind me.

You're probably thinking it's a couple of kids talking about stupid shit to each other and laughing like retarded buffoons.

But you'd be fucking wrong.

Behind me is a lone man sitting by himself.

How can that be? you're probably wondering. How can a lone man sitting by himself possibly be interrupting Kate's writing? Is it gas?

It's not gas, is it?

Nope.

And for possibly the only time in my fucking life, I actually wish that were the problem.

He's talking on his fucking cell phone.

On speaker.

There's a special place in hell for these cocksuckers.

So not only do I have to listen to his incredibly boring, fucked-up conversation about absolutely fucking nothing, words that frankly would have been better left unsaid, but I also have to listen to whoever he's talking to squawking through the tinny little speaker on his fucking cell phone.

And the whole time, in addition to being incredibly fucking annoyed, I'm wondering why this needed to be a phone call at all.

Twenty-five fucking minutes.

Twenty-five minutes of absolutely fucking nothing.

For a fleeting moment, I almost found myself doing that liberal whiny-ass thing where I wished there were some government regulation against this shit.

Just kidding.

I didn't.

Ever.

But it did raise a question about entitlement. Because what kind of fucking entitlement does it take to walk into a shared space and assume everybody else should be perfectly happy listening to your fucking phone conversation?

That's the part I don't understand.

What kind of person lacks social awareness so completely that they can do this for twenty-five fucking minutes and never feel shame? Never notice the eyeballs drilling holes through the back of their fucking skull? Never sense me attempting to kill them with my fucking mind?

Put the fucking phone against your fucking ear.

Better yet, text.

Better yet, shut the fuck up and eat your goddamned waffle.

So I'm sitting there wrestling with the morality of this morning's atrocities when suddenly another voice joins the fucking symphony of chaos.

Not the voice coming through his phone.

Another person.

On another fucking speakerphone.

Now there are two people in this breakfast room simultaneously having completely separate conversations on speakerphone. Two actual people accompanied by two distant tinny fucking voices, all saying meaningless bullshit at the same time.

Fuck my life.

Fuck my ears, please, with great big donkey dicks. At least then I wouldn't have to hear this bullshit.

Now you're probably wondering why I warned you at the beginning that I was about to get controversial. And you're right to question me at this point in the story, because so far I've established nothing more controversial than the objectively correct proposition that people who use speakerphones in public are fucking monsters.

Here's the part that made me stop and think: Both people talking loudly on speakerphone were Black.

There. That's the observation.

And I don't know what the fuck to make of it.

Maybe nothing.

That's actually the problem with observations like this. My brain immediately wants to find the pattern. Were these two people related? Did they know each other? Is this behavior learned within a family? Is there some cultural difference at play that I'm completely unfamiliar with?

I don't fucking know.

I have exactly two data points, both sitting in the same hotel breakfast room at the same fucking time. That's not exactly enough information to start submitting papers for peer review.

And I'm not going to pretend I didn't notice they were Black simply because acknowledging race makes everybody fucking uncomfortable. I noticed. Then I wondered whether it meant anything.

Maybe it does.

Maybe it doesn't.

I don't have enough fucking information to know.

What I do know is that both of these particular people were being rude as fuck.

And that's enough for me.

Because regardless of race, culture, upbringing, political affiliation, socioeconomic status, astrological sign, blood type, favorite fucking breakfast cereal, or whether Mercury is currently in retrograde, nobody else in a public space wants to listen to your fucking speakerphone conversation.

Nobody.

So if you're one of those people who does this?

Please.

For the love of everything holy.

Put the fucking phone against your ear.