I’m sitting in terminal 3 of San Francisco International Airport (SFO, in case you’re an airport nerd or something), waiting for my 11:45pm (PDT, naturally) flight back east. I’ll have more on my whereabouts for the last couple of days in a later post, but for now, I wanted to get an observation out there…

I don’t know how it happened, but somewhere along the line, cell phones gave people a licence to shout in public. I personally try not to do it – if someone tells me they can’t hear me, I’ll call them back. But that’s me – I don’t like the world at large knowing what’s going on with my parents’ new house, or what movie Darren and I will be seeing on a given night.

I’m sitting near the podium at gate 63, and there’s a woman about 25 feet to my left, playing with her cell phone. While she’s fussing with the phone, she’s speaking to the man she’s with (we’ll presume they’re husband and wife) at a normal vocal level. But the second she took a call on that phone, I swear, I thought her husband had gone to get something to eat, and she was shouting instructions after him. A subtle (ha!) glance to my left revealed that, no, her husband was right there, and she was in fact shouting into her cell phone in much the same way that Donald Trump shouts the “previously on…” voiceovers on The Apprentice (“Madge, this airport is yuuuuuuge!”), totally oblivious to the fact her voice is carrying across this fairly empty, reasonably quiet terminal, as though a megaphone were being held in front of her mouth. It’s as though I’m going to be stuck on the same plane as Inconsiderate Cell Phone Man‘s mom.