UNITED STATES — Patrons of restaurants, bars, movie theaters, libraries, and other places where both cell phone and non-cell phone users often find themselves forced into close quarters may have a solution to the problem of disruptive and yakky cell phone users: phone booths – sans phones.Dennis Raney knows what it’s like to be a noise polluter, thanks to using his mobile phone. “I get on the cell phone and I do talk louder,” he confesses.
This self-knowledge is part of what motivated him to create the Fort Wayne, IN based C.P. Booth, which manufactures oak cabinets that retail for $2,995 and melamine cabinets that run a mere $2,650.
The concept behind Raney’s booths is similar to that of Cingular’s 2002 Courtesy Zone areas in Loews theater lobbies, which provided users with couches or counters to use for their conversations. These cell phone friendly areas save other patrons from overhearing unwanted chatter and provide cell phone users with a quiet place to hear their phone companions while simultaneously avoiding being labeled social boors.
The following year, Manhattan’s Biltmore Room introduced a glamorous leather cell phone booth and Chicago’s Boka matched it with a similar item decorated in lush velvet.
Although Tom Farley, the editor of Town & Country Modern Manners: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Social Graces, thinks the very idea is appalling because “They’re really just enabling the bad behavior,” the number of options available to cell phone users is increasing.
Recently, Michael Salemi and a Woburn MA partner introduced the world to their nightclub focused Cell Zone, which provides a sound-buffered cylinder with a transparent door and a $2,400 – $3,500 price tag. Although club owners “don’t want anything going on inside there” other than phone conversations, given the advent of erotic cell phone content, there’s no knowing what may need to be cleaned off of those doors in time – or what other nefarious purposes the Zones could be used for.
