Back when I was an undergraduate, my wife and I didn’t own a car. Instead, we took the bus everywhere. Living in Seattle, that meant very few inconveniences. The bus I took to school (and she took to work) was the route 43 (now known as the 44, if anyone’s keeping track). There used to be a half-way house for the mentally unstable just off the bus route, so the 43 was loaded with… interesting characters.
One of those characters was a man who would stand at the bus stop and direct traffic. If a car was coming down the road, he’d point at the car and then point further down the road, helpfully telling the driver that he was headed in the right direction. When he wasn’t busy directing traffic, he would hold his hand up to his head and talk into it, usually while staring down someone on the bus. If you were privileged enough to be the person he was staring down, you’d have to nod at him or he would spend the whole route talking into his hand and staring at you, nodding the whole time. No doubt: this man was nuts.
I read today, on Wired’s news feed, that in 2009 there will probably be 1 billion cell phones sold in that year alone, making it the most common personal device on the planet.