You know the deal…you answer your phone and on the line it’s a room full of people jabbering and no one actually on the phone with you, or it’s someone mumbling to themselves when they clearly think they’re alone, or—this is probably the most common—it’s the swishing of someone’s jeans as they’re walking.
Swish…swish…swish…
This was always a problem for cell phones with the dial pads on the outside, although with those it was mostly calls from random people and not your friends. Flip phones helped. But now it’s mostly people you know because they don’t use the locking feature on their touch-screen smartphones and the phones dial from the contact list or phone log.
T-Mobile ran a commercial about this…epidemic?…a while back.
“Aww, guess who it is? It’s your butt.”
Back when cell phones first came out—the ones that looked like walkie-talkies from the A-Team or actual pay phones from phone booths—there was never any question of accidentally dialing someone with your posterior. Not unless you were using one as a bar stool.
“Your butt says to get rid of that phone you’re sitting on…”
Now it’s this biiiig problem. Enough of one that they actually made a commercial about it. And, honestly, they could have done a whole series. Your butt calls…your purse calls…your thigh calls…
Who could have imagined this…syndrome?…back when they were first designing cell phones? It just didn’t come up, guaranteed—you could barely fit one of those things into your car, let alone your pocket. But it’s coming up now. And soon it might be more than just phone calls.
Smartphones can do a lot of different things these days. Do any of us really need to be texting our significant others suspicious, possibly drunken gobbledygook thrown together by our phone’s auto-text features (“nice you her better”)? Or emailing our bosses stuff that may or may not be resignation notices (“uhhhhhhhhhhhhh”)?
Probably not. But communications technology will only keep evolving, so we better watch our steps. We certainly don’t want to be buying stock indiscriminately on our brokers’ IVR system. That would be bad.
“…so no more butt dialing. Yayyy.”
“Yay.”
“Oh, really—?”
“—My butt just hung up on you. Sorry.”
