Hang up the %$#@&^^ phone

I was driving down 8th Street hill a little while ago. I was behind a red pickup truck whose driver (male) was talking on a cell phone. I don't know if he wasn't familiar with the road or if he just wasn't paying attention.

Once we crossed the pink bridge, he couldnd't decide which lane he wanted to be in, so he straddled the line. He decided before we got to the red light. He took one lane, I took the other. He was still talking on his phone when a woman driving a car made a left turn from 13th Avenue onto 8th Street. She was talking on her phone.

I looked over at the walking track. A 20-something couple was walking hand-in-hand. He was quiet because he had no one to talk to. Even though she was walking and holding hands with her guy, the young woman was engrossed in a cell phone conversation.

I got back to the office and told a co-worker about this. He said he was up at Rotary Park the other day and saw a man playing catch with a boy. The man couldn't catch anything with his glove because he used his left shoulder to cradle the cell phone he was talking into. We knew which was more important at the time -- the phone or the boy.

I told my coworker of being at Harris Riverfront Park last fall. I watched as a woman pushed a kid of maybe two years on a swing. She barely knew he was there. The kid could have put a sack of flour on the swing and wandered off, seeing as how the woman's full attention was on her phone. From the look on her face, she wasn't dealing with any sort of emergency.

Can people just not be connected any more? Have we freely been assimilated into the Borg collective?

Or am I just an old coot?