I keep my cell phone on vibrate at all the time in order to keep from the awkward situation of forgetting to switch my cell phone from a ring tone to vibrate. Now I have the problem of not feeling my phone when someone is calling, so I miss tons of my calls. Recently I witnessed a person’s phone ringing with a special tone for the caller; the ring made me question who the caller was and I think they realized that, which set an awkward tone to their conversation. In addition, being a college student people are calling at all parts of the day especially in the early hours of the morning when I am trying to sleep. The unfortunate part is that I set my phone to charge before I go to bed and in doing so it puts the phone to ring (which I need for my alarm). So when I am sound asleep at 4am I receive a call, wake up abruptly, try to silence the sound and unfortunately I open the phone to try to stop the noise and then realize I just answered the call and feel obligated to continue the conversation.
I would propose an alternate to vibrate, maybe some kind of one way lens on my glasses that will do a dull flash when I am receiving a call. Another idea would be to have some kind of audio device that could only be picked up by the people within a foot of the cell phone, or maybe a small ear piece so that only the cell phone owner can hear the call coming in and there will be no embarrassing situations. For the late night/early morning calls I would set up a system that caused the people calling to under a short series of questions that can be used to judge their current mental state. If they pass then the call is forward to my phone, and if they do not then they are directed to my voice mail, along with a recording of them answering the questions (for later laughs).
The social technical gaps would arise with what questions would be used to evaluate the callers mental state, but what about emergencies? How would the system pick up on the tone of urgency and would the caller hang up to not deal with the new hassle? These problems and this solution are very context specific, like Acerman reminds me that technology is not available to be manipulated to our way of life.
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i actually like the way apple sort-of remedied one of the situations you mentioned with the iphone. Even if you're phone is set to vibrate mode, your alarms make noise by default. If you don't want it to make a sound, you just hit "none" when you're picking what sound you want to wake up to. Still, I think your idea about stopping people from drunk dialing you late at night is hilarious, Gmail has a labs feature now that does something similar (if you're trying to send an email at a time when most people get drunk, it makes you solve math problems before you can send it).
ReplyDeleteAngel! yes yes yes dude. This post is hysterical and very true. I cannnot stand when I am drunk-dialed by my friends late at night. Especially when it's the middle of the week like tuesday and wednesday! Honestly, who drinks on tuesdays?! Asking them a series of questions and judging their answers might be a farfetched idea, but I totally back you on it. Great post!
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