In more “I can’t believe the fucking New York Times actually reported this story” news, there’s this little gem about texting during dinner. Seems that lots of people text while eating. And guess what: Texting while dining with other people is rude.
Remember that episode of “Family Ties” when Alex worked late at the grocery store and tried to study at the breakfast table and his dad was all, “Don’t do that?” Of course you don’t. Because it was a sitcom, and sitcoms are forgettable, which apparently is what the New York Times wants to be.
Look, we don’t want to be the arbiters of taste (false modesty), but if someone has to tell you to stop texting at the dinner table, you should be killed. Or at least maimed terribly. Preferably in the thumbs.
Anyway, the story contains 1,381 reasons why newspapers are dying. Here are just a few snippets:
Texting while eating has become a major issue among couples in counseling, says Evan Imber-Black, a prominent family therapist. And, yes, she says, it seems the men are the ones who can’t sit down for dinner for a half-hour without tapping away at their phones. (The reverse is true among teenagers, where the girls are the nonstop texters.)
So at heart grown men are as mature as teenage girls. Just throwing that out there.
[Danah] Boyd is 31. Sometimes she looks up from her glowing iPhone screen to see her husband, Gilad Lotan, a Microsoft designer, frowning at her across the table.
“If I’m sitting there privately responding to messages, Gilad might say, ‘Hey, I thought we were at dinner,’ ” she said. “I’ll be, like, ‘Hmm, sorry, just doing this quickly.’ ”
They both bring their iPhones to the table, she said, using them as conversational tools. If they’re debating a question, for instance, they might use their phones to look up the answer.
They try to avoid texting, she said, “if it’s a dinner where we’re trying to be engaged.” (As opposed to a dinner “where we both need food in our systems so we can both get back to work.”).
Going out on a limb here: There are bigger problems in their marriage than texting during dinner. Like, they’re both assholes.
Our favorite part of the story is the ending:
“My son would never dream of texting at the table,” said [Lydia] Shire, a chef and restaurant owner in Boston. “And he wouldn’t do it at anyone else’s table, either.”
True, said her 19-year-old son, Alex Pineda. To take out his BlackBerry Dream would be to distract from his mother’s amazing cooking, and the conversation with her and his father.
The kid knows the score. See which item in the list comes first? Our request to the New York Times: If you’re going to do frivolous stories, how about a piece on why women think Dane Cook is funny? Thanks!
