Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: Murder in the Sky

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...I feel a rant coming on, so consider this an official rant alert. Almost nothing I am about say will have anything to do with sales or marketing, but it needs to be said, or, at least, I need to say it.

I was horrified to read in the papers the other day that the FAA is about to cancel its ban on cell phone use during flights. Soon we'll be able to make calls while the plane is flying, which means we are about to lose the last bit of silent sanctuary the world offers us.

We've already lost that silence at airports. If television news isn’t blaring at us and airline gate personnel aren't screaming at us in four languages, then a 22-year-old girl next to us is talking non-stop for hours. Who are those people on the other end of the phone anyway? I don’t know what I’d do if I answered the phone and heard some gum-smacking. fingernails-on-chalkboard irritating voice say, “My flight is delayed for three hours and I have nothing to do. Let’s talk!” It's hell on earth!

Now the FAA will allow such people to talk all they want for hours during each flight...sitting right next to you, in front of you, and behind you. Are you kidding me? I have a feeling that soon we'll be reading about fights breaking out mid-air as one passenger tries to cram a phone up another passenger's…well, you get the picture.

My mind chillingly wanders to the conversations I've heard in the past in airports (heard, not overheard, mind you, because these people just don’t care who hears their conversations). Like the 18-year-old girl who talks endlessly about her latest breakup, or the 19-year-old guy who thinks we all want to hear about how drunk he got last night (I wish he would find the instructions to his baseball cap so he'd know the visor goes in the front and not the back or, worse yet, to the side), or the 75-year-old woman giving a play-by-play of her recent medical procedures These people just don’t seem to care who hears them.

I think back to the young lady (it is most frequently young ladies, isn’t it?) who sat across the aisle from me as we were getting ready to board a red-eye from LA to New York. She was frantically speed-dialing what seemed like hundreds of people with a rushed, “Look, they’re going to close the cabin door in a minute, but I just wanted you to know I will be out of pocket for the next five hours. I’ll call you when we land” over and over again. I swear she called at least 25 people telling them the same message as fast as she could. It made me wonder if she was Condoleezza or Hillary or someone else who could not be out of pocket for that long. But, no, she looked more like she was going to be late getting to her job at the nail salon the next day. What will she be like when she can talk to all those people for five hours…right across the aisle from me?

Then there’s the guy who was hanging onto the phone for dear life while holding up one finger to indicate to the flight attendant that he needed just one more minute as he talked to what must have been his boss excitedly telling him that he had closed the big deal that day. “That’s right, you heard right! He bought 500 of them and the price was great! You would have been proud of me--I got him up to five cents each. Yeah, he wanted to pay three cents, but I got him up to five!” You do the math on this guy’s “big deal.” What will that guy be like when he can close all of his big deals in flight, while bothering everyone around him?

I shudder as I remember the guy sitting in front of me in first class on an Alaska Airlines flight from San Jose to Seattle. He was talking to his wife about their son: “Did he do his homework? What did he study first? No, I told you that he needs to do history first. How many times do I have to tell you that he does his history first? What did you guys eat for dinner? No, you should have eaten the roast, not the spaghetti! Don’t you listen to anything I tell you? Did you get my shirts from the cleaners today like I asked? Did they put the right amount of starch on them?”

There's no poetic license here, I am quoting this guy verbatim, and he went on like this for 10 minutes! What will that guy be like when he can talk and control to his heart’s content?

Just thinking about the possibilities of cell phone use during flights makes my blood turn cold. Can you imagine the chaos this is going to cause? Never mind terror threats, this decision is going to put terror right on the plane with us. It’s likely to turn normal, law-abiding citizens (like yours truly) into terrorists!

All we can do now is wait and hope that even if the United States government doesn’t have enough sense to stop this insanity, maybe the airlines will. Then again, why would I even think that? They have not exactly been bastions of wisdom in the past--especially if they can charge us for those phone calls.

I think I’ll invest in noise-cancelling ear buds…it's only common sense.