Cell Phones Are
Jarring, Offensive

As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it! In the case of cell phone coverage, the community as a whole should be taken into consideration. Cell phone service to Rochester may be a Pandora’s box.

Most of us are familiar by now with the drivers who run red lights, ignore traffic conditions, and otherwise seem to suspend all ability to make sound decisions while cell phones are glued to their ears. State laws have acknowledged as much.

We are also beginning to get accustomed to having music suddenly break out from nowhere, someone standing nearby suddenly strike up a conversation with no one in particular, as if they were in their own living room.

Yesterday in CVS in Rutland, an extended family the next aisle over from me was loudly shopping, comparing, deciding. I guessed that they were visitors to Vermont. One of their group wandered off and the immediate impulse was to get on the cell phone and call that person’s phone to find out where they were … inside the store! Fortunately, the wanderer came around the corner in the nick of time.

One summer, while a National Park ranger, I was posted at the visitor’s center counter. A cell phone jingled and suddenly the room was dominated by a one-sided, loud conversation that seemed to have to do with a medical emergency, possibly either a miscarriage or a suicide attempt, many miles away. The woman taking the call seemed to be some kind of nurse. It was no one else’s business, of course, but she made it everyone’s business. It was certainly an embarrassing moment for all those around her.

Cell phone users notoriously go into a very private space on their phones, oblivious of everything around them. Yet they do this in public, drawing everyone around them into their world.

Is this what we want for Rochester?

For example, what about the families who will now be hard pressed by their own kids to buy one or more cell phones, at a time when we all are wondering how we will afford to put gas in the car to get to work (assuming that we actually have regular work)? Would we really be stunting our kids’ growth by closing off access to yet another expensive electronic gadget? What about the imaginative, interactive, and productive use of time that kids need to cultivate?

Business owners striving for a peaceful atmosphere might find themselves making the difficult choice between denying one customer’s pleasure and convenience for the sake of others.

Visitors will end up on the phone instead of getting to know us and appreciating the beauty and history that is our valley.

We might end up asking ourselves what ever happened to the special character that is Rochester, without the jarring, offensive, inappropriate intrusion that is the cell phone.

Julia Purdy

Rochester