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Re-evaluating Cell Phones in Elevators

Most of us have been there before: our elevator door opens and in walks a woman mid-conversation on her cellular phone. The situation becomes an instant private joke amongst the other passengers, who smile and roll their eyes as she loudly, obliviously, discusses intimate details. How can she not be embarrassed, we silently wonder. Eventually she reaches her floor and exits the elevator mid-sentence. We smile to each other once more, and resume watching the floor numbers change until we reach our stop.

I used to feel that people who talked on cell phones on elevators were just plain rude. What right did they have to commandeer a public space for their own personal use? Had they no respect for their fellow passengers? I toyed with ways to combat the situation: taking notes on the conversation and showing them to the caller while he spoke, taking out my own cell phone and pretending to have a competing loud conversation of my own, or just glaring at the perpetrator.

Until I started to consider what we do tolerate on elevators.

We don't seem to mind when two people board the elevator and talk to each other, so what is it that annoys us when one person does it? At first I thought it might have something to do with the elevator occupancy notice: could we be subconsciously concerned that the person on the other end of the phone conversation would be enough to push us over the limit? Perhaps we just felt claustrophobic with the essence of the extra person in the elevator?

Except we have the same reaction when we are alone with the talker.

I have since decided that our real objection is that we are nosey. We resent that we can only hear one side of the conversation and can only guess at the responses at the other end. We aren't annoyed that we are hearing too much, but that we're hearing too little.

Of course, our level of frustration depends on which end of the conversation we're listening to. For every elevator salivating over the juicy details of an illicit affair, there's another elevator whose occupants are only hearing "Uh huh", "Really?" and "No way!" Perhaps rather than being annoyed when someone holds an embarrassing one-sided conversation in our elevator, we should feel grateful we are not in the other car.

Elevators are awkward spaces with or without cell phones. More likely than not, passengers tend to ignore each other: watching the floor number lights change, reading posted notices - anything to avoid eye contact. At one time, insipid, calming, music was piped into the elevator to calm the riders' anxieties of being trapped in a small space with strangers. Perhaps our issues with cell phones on elevators have more to do with our battles with social insecurity in the face of those who have already overcome them.

Perhaps watching someone who is comfortable being the center of attention causes us to feel the embarrassment we'd feel if it were us.

Learn more about this author, Scott D. Morrow.
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