I just wanted a quiet evening.
A little pasta and salad, a glass of wine, and a chat with one of the more urbane bartenders in the world.
This little Italian restaurant near my house is unassuming. Some of the staff have worked there for more than a decade.
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It's a very nice place to sit at the bar, read your novel about a gruesome murder in a convent, and muse about life's extreme nonsense.
It was a busy night. I took the only remaining seat at the bar. Cristiano the bartender and I exchanged our usual pleasantries about why Real Madrid is one of the worst soccer teams in the world. (He disagrees.)
I read for a few minutes, until loud music[2] interrupted.
No, it wasn't the restaurant's sound system. It was the man next to me, who was watching a surfing video on his iPhone[3]. The volume was on full blast. Headphones[4] were nowhere to be seen.
When the video finished, he turned around, apologized profusely and explained he needed an ego boost from his bygone professional surfing days.
I'm kidding, of course. He played another surfing video. Yes, complete with loud music.
I find this sort of thing perplexing. I don't want to annoy others, save, some might grunt, when I write this column. Yet it seems that the constant presence of phones has given people permission to pretend there's no one in the world but them.