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Customers of cell phone civility advocate
Date: Jan 26, 2005
Contributor: Guy Coan
Shari Rosen and a friend were eating dinner at a Red Lobster awhile back, trying to have a conversation, and all they could hear was one of the guys in the next booth bellowing into his cell phone.
"I was ready to go over the divider and yank it away," she says. If she'd wanted to listen to a telephone conversation, for Pete's sake, she'd have stayed home and had one.
Rosen, 54, is old enough to remember a world without cell phones. As best she can recall, it functioned just fine. "I think they're annoying as heck," she says -- and three weeks ago, she struck a small blow for silence and civility.
At the Kenny's Ribs & Chicken outlet in Southfield where she's an assistant manager, she requisitioned a sign to prop up on the counter. "We Will Gladly Take Your Order," it reads, "After You Finish Using Your Cell Phone."
Kenny's is a Chicago-based chain with a few restaurants in Metro Detroit and Indiana. On the southern outskirts of the Tel-Twelve Mall, where Rosen works, it shares space with a Caribbean-flavored sister called Island Chicken. At Kenny's, you can get terrific fried chicken, rib tips and hot links. And if you have a phone to your ear when you reach the counter, you'll get ignored.
"I've had 10 people standing in line behind someone jibber-jabbering on a cell phone like nothing else in the world matters," Rosen says. In a service business, "You can't be rude and say, 'Hey, d'ya mind?'" But if you have a placard say it for you, she has discovered, you can point to it and smile sweetly and maybe get someone to hang up.
"People have remarked about it: 'You know, I like that,'" she says. "A lot of them have cell phones, so I think the hint is coming across."
Just for spice, Rosen copied a cartoon she saw in the newspaper a few weeks ago and added it to the sign. It shows a couple being robbed at gunpoint by a seedy character with a phone cocked to his ear. The husband, arms raised, is telling his wife, "And I thought that was annoying in restaurants!"
PLENTY OF good seats remain available in the Detroit Institute of Arts' auditorium, the historic room that has hosted everything from Amelia Earhart to "Wings of Desire."
"Wings of Desire" was actually about angels, not airplanes, so it wasn't actually all that slick of me to link it with a famous pilot. On the other hand, it was a movie, and most visitors to the auditorium these past few decades have attended the Detroit Film Theatre series. So maybe I'm crafty after all.
In any event, the 1,150 cushy seats in the 77-year-old hall have seen better days, and the DIA has invited patrons to help replace them. For a $325 donation, you can adopt a seat and have a message of up to 60 characters engraved on an armrest nameplate.
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