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May 01, 2005
Take it outside
At my very core, I am a nerd. A big, stinking nerd. I think most of you know that. I try to hide it some times, but that doesn't often last too long.
For the longest time, my favorite thing was to visit used book stores. Books feed my nerdiness. My fourteen year old self would wet his pants if he lived in Chicago, because there are about a hundred used book stores in the city. Whenever we went to Cincinnati, I always made my family go to the Ohio Book Store, which was the only used book store in the state that I knew about.
This has a lot to do with my grandfather, who filled the entire basement of his house with his own personal library. He had books about everything by everyone. Legend has it, he read every one. When he died, we took what we wanted and the rest were donated to a store in Buffalo. The books filled so many boxes that we had to make multiple trips. My dad has a similar library in his basement, and I am now accumulating one of my own.
Today, I was peddling along Clark Street when I spied The Bookman's Corner, which I go by way too often to make having visited it only once a crime. I stopped, locked up the bicycle, and was transported back to a different time. Books were stacked to the ceiling, too high for me to reach, arranged haphazardly by category so that you had no idea what you would find. Eventually I found the history category, and spent a good half hour browsing around until I settled for an anthology of WW2 newspaper correspondent articles for the digusting price of $2.18. (Such as this one.)
Pardon me for getting all nostalgic there, because that wasn't even what I meant to write about. When I entered the store, a small handwritten sign sternly warned, "please take all phone conversations outside." This was a reasonable rule for a book store, and I usually endorse such things.
However, the shopkeeper was setting a very bad example. He was talking very loudly to a customer, and the narrow corridors of the store only amplified the noise. His conversation partner was the loud one, and I could not help but notice the irony of the topic: obnoxious children on airplanes, trains, and other enclosed public places. Some people are simply loud talkers - I can't necessarily fault somebody for that.
However, I feel that a loud face-to-face conversation is as rude as a loud mobile phone conversation. The topic was banal of the highest nature, between two friends in a closed space. It must disturb the other customers. Isn't that the essence of the reason for banning phone conversations?
Posted by oz115 at May 1, 2005 05:39 PM