In message , at 23:10:34 on Thu,
17 Nov 2005, M. J. Powell remarked:
So if someone insists on silence, and that affects someone who has an
important phone call to make...

If it was that important why wait until you're on a bus/train. Make it
before you leave.

You may be on the train, which like one I was travelling to London on
recently, grinds to a halt for twenty minutes just before arriving at
the terminus (it eventually got to West Hampstead and turned everyone
off to trudge to the tube station in the rain). You may need to warn
people you are late.

Catch an earlier train, I hear you starting to say. Well, sadly, I find
I do have to anyway because of their unreliability, and infrequency. I
live on a route with effectively one per hour. Although I can get from
the terminus to the meeting in 30 minutes, I do need to catch the train
which gets me to the terminus at 12.15 for a 2pm meeting, because the
1.15 is cutting it too fine.

Meanwhile, the world does not stop revolving when you are on a train - I
was halfway to London on a two hour train journey yesterday when one of
the co-organisers of the meeting I was going to rang me to ask an
important procedural question. Fifty other people could have been
inconvenienced if I had been unable to answer it promptly.

What, I hear you ask, would I have done before the days of mobile
phones? I've had one since 1988, so we are going back a fair way, but
the answer is that I employed a fulltime secretary to organise such
things for me when I was otherwise uncontactable, and whose job it was
to make sure that when I went out she knew the landline numbers of
everywhere I was likely to be (and the names of the secretaries of all
the people I was visiting).

This has all changed in the name of "greater efficiency and
productivity", and people are more demanding, too.
--
Roland Perry