Stop Hijacking My Personal Space
August 8, 2013
I was at the doctor’s office the other day, pleasantly flipping through the spring issue of a home and garden magazine, when my quiet moment was “hijacked” by another patient sitting across the room. There were about 20 people in the waiting room—all of us sitting quietly, waiting our turn. The key word here is … “quietly.” There were two children waiting for their grandmother, who were sitting ever-so-quietly—the young boy was playing with a Gameboy or some other handheld electronic device and the little girl, who couldn’t have been more than four, was happily coloring in her coloring book. The waiting room was… as expected…quiet.
And then the hijacking occurred.
I literally jumped, as I was absorbed in the article I was reading, when I heard this (very loudly) echo across the room: “What ethnicity am I? I know what race I am, but the papers they want me to fill out ask me for my ethnicity? So would you say I’m European? Should I put that? And what about my medication? I know I take X medication and Y medication, and then for my arthritis I take that Z medication, but what is it I take for the irritable bowel again?”
I glanced around the room to see that I wasn’t the only one who had their heads lifted, glancing (some glaring) at the woman in the center of the room who was practically yelling into her cell phone. She was filling out paperwork for the doctor and proceeded to go through every single question with the recipient on the other end of the phone. This went on for close to 15 minutes. When she was through with the form, she stayed on the phone to spill a little gossip about the lady who lives behind her who, in her words, “is always flaunting her wares up and down her driveway… why she can’t put on some clothes to get her mail is beyond me. It just ain’t right. Is it? I mean, she has grown teenagers and she walks around all…” Well, you get he picture. All 19 of us were subjected to this story…whether we wanted to be privy to it or not.
Our privacy—our silence—was hijacked!
I am sure every single one of you reading this has a story of being hijacked. Whether it’s in a doctor’s office, grocery store or in an elevator—there are so many people who don’t recognize that their conversations are hijacking the personal space of others.
In a recent study, published in the journal of PLoS One, college kids who were asked to complete anagrams while a nearby researcher talked on her cellphone were more irritated and distracted—and far more likely to remember the contents of the conversation. The study is part of growing research on why cell phones rank so high on the list of modern day irritants.
So what do we do to solve this? We would love to hear your thoughts, and your experiences. Let’s start a movement to “stop the hijacking!”
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