It seems as if every time you go on the bus, walk in the hallway or eat your lunch, someone is laughing obnoxiously and talking nonsense into a cell phone. I am definitely one of those people who are in love with their cell phone. Still, even I have to question, has cell phone usage turned to abuse?

For example, when I go on the bus, there’s always at least one person who talks so loud that the whole bus hears them. I don’t want to hear random gossip that I could care less about; it’s even worse when that person will shove by you to get off the bus, knock you onto the ground, and just walk off laughing because the other person on the phone has said something hilarious.

There’s aslo that random interruption in class. Picture this: as the teacher is lecturing, a ring goes off, a student mumbles sorry and turns off their phone, and the lesson then continues. What if it’s the teacher’s phone that rings? I’ve seen teachers who simply ignore it to set the right example, but I can also recall teachers who claimed that there’s an emergency in the family and their significant other’s, mother’s, father’s, call is important, just because.

One of my friends might text me in class sometime and this puts me in a position where I have to decide whether to answer it or wait another twenty minutes for lunch. Usually, I choose the later because choosing the first means losing at least a minute of note-taking, not to mention the chance of getting your phone taken away by the teacher. The text message is probably of minor importance anyways. So what’s the point?

People use their cell phones for more then just communicating at appropriate or

inappropriate times. At Abraham Lincoln High School, consequences of using a cell phone during a test have been added to school policy as an attempt to eliminate the possibility of students text messaging answers to each other. One such consequence is confiscation, which many of us have faced before. Despite the fact that most people I know don’t use their cell phone during tests, there are still a big enough number of people who do this to put a punishment on it. Text messaging isn’t the only way people can use cell phones to cheat either. Other cell phone features include a calculator, Internet access, entertainment, and media such as V-cast. The potential for cheating is obvious. I love how my cell phone can do so much, but it gets annoying when people start using their cell phones to cheat or even to blast music outside my classroom while I’m trying to figure out a particularly difficult math problem.

There are times when the cell phone menace drives me so insane that I just want to shove it in their ear and laugh at them because radiation is now circulating in their brain. I read through my own cell phone manual table of contents, and saw that there is actually a section on radiation. People in Japan are so afraid of the radiation from their cell phones that they even put a little sticker on their cell phones to absorb it! That is what I learned from a trip to Japan from various sales people and tour guides.

Even though I believe my cell phone is practically an extension of my body, I think things have gone too far. Cell phones weren’t created as a solution for boredom; instead they were created for immediate emergency usage. Whoever decided that cell phones were invented for interrupting class or annoying people on the bus has lost their mind. If you’re one of the people who talk for hours at a time on the phone with a friend, I suggest this: Put the phone down and talk to a friend face to face for once.