Agreed. I think that technology has enabled people to become more rude, or perhaps, rude with technological efficiency applied to their rudeness, allowing them to apply rude applications in wider circles that affect more people. But yes, the basic idea is still the same.

When it comes to laptops in coffee houses, I don’t have a problem with it, but I don’t work in a coffee house. I remember a boyfriend I had in college who told me once, after I said I was going to the University library to study for a test, “Go to the Friendly restaurant around the corner, order a cup of coffee, then stay as long as you like and study, get free refills, spread out your books and finish what you have to do.”

This advice, at the age of 19, when I’d never ever worked in a restaurant, was unfathomable to me. Why would I want to take up a table in someone’s station for a dollar cup of coffee, have someone continue to serve me for whatever length of time, just to have a quiet (but not really that quiet, if the restaurant got busy. After all, the serve ice cream, so what if a bunch of kids come in to eat ice cream?) study session, when I could go to the library and do all that for free, with the cost of an (admittedly lousy) cup of vending machine coffee, while not bothering anyone or costing anyone any lost income?

Honestly, I don’t get it.

1. some customers have always been jerks. it isn’t the cell phone’s or laptop’s fault that some people just don’t know how to act.

2. as far as laptop use in coffee houses go, I thought it was kosher to do your homework at coffee places. I like to go on weekends and I’ll usually get a couple of drinks while I’m there. if I’m writing a paper, I’ll take my laptop. does that really bother people? I wouldn’t stay if there were people waiting on a table…

http://www.chow.com/stories/11624?tag=sidebar;columns

(Besha sent me that.)

My mother raised me with manners and even as a mom who has barely gotten the hang of cell phones, she simply refuses to take or continue calls if she is a situation where she interacts with another person. I do the same. I do not think it unreasonable for people to relearn common decency in order to follow suit.

Uh, sorry. That rant went wittered on it more than I intended.

The only thing we can do now is to refuse to greet someone who is obviously in conversation. No, I’m not going to learn your new sign language gesture for “I want a Coke,” just because you can’t take the phone away from your ear for 2 seconds. Really, controlling the behavior of guests is not an easy proposition, and any time you step in and try to stop people from rudely disturbing other people’s dining experience, you risk being called rude for trying to reign them in. It’s all we can do to say a few, very polite words to mothers with shrieking children.

As far as comparisons to reading a newspaper, I’ve never seen anyone camp out at a table with a newspaper while a restaurant was on a wait. I have seen couples avoid talking to each other or even looking at one another with a newspaper, but that’s just making a spectacle of one’s self and inviting others to ponder why the hell you two don’t just get divorced already.

I have seen people camp in front of televisions, of course, but that’s why we only have 2 small TVs, located in the bar area, so that we can consciously limit that sort of behavior. No such limit seems feasible for laptops and other such devices, so all we can do is aggressively and obtrusively manicure everything off of the table when a patron has long outstayed his welcome. Many patrons are oblivious to this, unfortunately.

Yes, I’d love to ban all rude people from our restaurant, but I’m afraid that then I’d have far fewer people left to wait on.

Still, I can’t compare staring at my Itouch or blogging at Starbucks to smoking. I understand that the invasion of laptops creates a different aesthetic and I understand that many of you would rather people not be inhabiting cyberspace and the coffeeshop at the same time. But the tone of your objections amount to that of my own contrary expectation: annoyance. Or dare I say “crankiness”? As in “Get off my lawn!” Anyway, I’m not going to stop eating at Taqueria del Sol because they don’t have wi-fi.

As to your observation that nobody ever turns off, Kali, some are even taking that further:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/ptech/04/14/twitter.study/index.html

The notion that Twittering is causing moral decay makes me laugh. It reminds me of the kind of thing people said about Elvis and the Beatles.

As y’all know, or I guess you do, I also work in psychology. One of the things I have done with a growing number of clients is get them to start writing blogs. Sometimes these are public but more often they are just between me and the client.

I make assignments, either imagistic or written, and they reply. You would be surprised how much information arises in that medium that doesn’t in the consulting room or in ordinary writing. It seems to be an effect of the medium itself.

If you are interested in how occupancy of cyberspace might enhance experience rather than restrain it, you might want to look at these videos from Toronto, especially “Out of the Fishbowl”:

http://www.richmondculturalseminars.com

What you are observing in coffeehouses and elsewhere is a transformation of public space but you would be quite wrong to presume that it is necessarily depersonifying or disembodying.

I know, I know…I sound like a smoker. But, really, look deeper. I used to feel the same way, but then I lit up, I mean turned on, I mean fell down the rabbit hole….

PS
I am not shocked at all that rude behavior like that is happening in Buckhead.

But I must indeed be eating in the wrong restaurants because I have been nowhere that I’ve seen people sitting around killing time on the internet — at least not in numbers that could seriously affect sales.

People have been conducting business over lunch for as long as I can remember, so the presence of a laptop then is just a tool in that scenario. It’s not an amusement that changes anything but the aesthetics.

If, as y’all say, people are really going into Buckhead restaurants and sitting for inordinate periods of time in front of their laptops and you think it decreases your sales, then why in the world wouldn’t you ban them or establish a limit? As I said, I don’t find silent use of a laptop or Blackberry nearly as annoying as people gabbing on phones or Blue Tooth devices that make them look like schizophrenics talking to the air.

As for the uses of laptops in coffeehouses, Kali, I’m mystified by your attitude. This is not a new development in the culture. Ten years ago, when I was commuting monthly to LA, coffeehouses served as people’s mobile offices all over town.

Now, here, just as there, actual communities develop around individual coffeehouses because of this phenomenon. (I’ve watched this happen for seven years at the Ansley STarbucks.) It is hard for me to believe anyone regards this as bad for business in the long term.

Of course, it’s a shift in the service model, I guess — just like the ubiquity of cell phones and flat-screen TVs.