I know all of us have experienced this: You set your cell phone ring to a loud volume, to make sure you'll always hear it. Later, you're sitting in some kind of meeting, and your boss is making a speech. The room is totally silent except for your boss's voice. Suddenly your phone rings. The ring now seems RIDICULOUSLY loud compared to the quietness of the meeting room. Now you have to fish it out of your pocket, flip it open, and find the volume button, or the button that diverts it to voicemail, or whatever the hell you have to do to just make the damn thing stop ringing. By the time you make it stop, it's already been ringing really loud for like 30 seconds, and everyone else in the room is annoyed, and you're totally embarrassed.
To solve this problem, I propose a cell phone that instantly becomes silent whenever you smack it really hard with your hand. If it rings in the middle of a meeting, you don't even have to take it out of your pocket. Just smack the outside of your pants pocket with your hand. The cell phone will "feel" the smack through the fabric and instantly stop ringing. The phone would be designed so that only a hard smack will silence it, so it won't get silenced by bumping into someone in the elevator.
Now, if your phone rings in the middle of a meeting, and if you think the call might be urgent, go ahead and smack it, just to stop the sound. After you've smacked it, you can then quietly take it out of your pocket and check who's calling, without drawing attention to yourself. The smack would only silence the ringer, it wouldn't divert the call or anything, so the call could still be answered after a smack.-- navigatr85, Aug 21 2009 My mobile is unlikely to be upset by a little slap http://www.vertu.co...ent/ascent-ti/testsCheck "Controlled Free-fall" - look carefully at the slate :-) [AbsintheWithoutLeave, Aug 25 2009] //go ahead and smack it//
I have a strong urge to turn this phrase into the title for a song. [=]-- DrWorm, Aug 22 2009 "Beat it, beat it, beat it, beat it..."-- normzone, Aug 22 2009 Being a HUGE fan of slapping, I must bun this. I also thought as a decoy movement you might want to slap your head a few times first, then go for the phone. People will fear you in the future, but that is good.
A sideways slap for ya +++++. Good job. In fact I'd clap but I can't. I'm too busy slapping myself.-- blissmiss, Aug 22 2009 21 Quest inadvertantly must have missed the part about "smacking".
Shaking and bumping are in a whole different genre of noises, along with other soundless sound effects and stuff?-- blissmiss, Aug 22 2009 I think you'll find this is baked, but a single slap is rarely effective - generally, you'll need a double slap. A single slap could just mean you'd dropped it.-- AbsintheWithoutLeave, Aug 22 2009 "Given that most phones will go silent simply by pressing any key... and that most phones have external keys... all you have to do is smack the part of the phone with the external keys." My phone has external keys, but they're small, and they can't be easily pressed by smacking. If I wanted to press them while my phone was in my pocket, I'd have to put my fingers in just the right spot and sort of squeeze the phone.
"At my job you can get fired for your phone ringing in a meeting." Seriously? That seems really harsh. I've heard people's phones ring during meetings at two different jobs I've had, and the person faced no negative consequences (except embarrassment). Maybe your company has higher standards for you, simply because you're a cell phone support person. But still, it seems harsh. What company do you work at?
"Smacking your cellphone 'really hard' is a really good way to break it." I thought almost every cell phone these days is entirely solid-state, with no easily breakable mechanical parts. If I have an electronic device that contains a hard drive, and I smack it really hard, that could definitely break the hard drive. But most cell phones don't have hard drives. Also, aren't most cell phones designed to be sturdy, so that they'll still be fine if you accidentally drop them on the floor?
"...especially if there's anything else in your pocket alongside it." Yeah, that's a good point. Users of a smack-silent phone would have to be told to be careful about keeping other things in the same pocket as the phone. I think certain objects would be ok, though, like a driver's license.
"21 Quest inadvertantly must have missed the part about "smacking". Shaking and bumping are in a whole different genre of noises, along with other soundless sound effects and stuff?" "The poster didn't say it was the sound that triggered it." Yeah, I was thinking that the sound wouldn't trigger it, just the force of the slap. I think blissmiss understood that the sound wouldn't trigger it, but I think she was just saying that she'd enjoy hearing the sound of her hand slapping her leg. :) It could be a form of stress relief too. :)-- navigatr85, Aug 24 2009 //I know all of us have experienced this// No you don't!-- DrBob, Aug 24 2009 [navigatr85], you may want to check into your nearest mental hospital. You actually understood everything I meant. I thought [21] would as well.
(Uh...I thought the "soundless sounds" was a dead give away...but I guess not ;-)-- blissmiss, Aug 24 2009 //At my job you can get fired for your phone ringing in a meeting, regardless of how long it rings.//
Fuck that noise. Tell them to shove their job right up there beside their heads.
I don't know you too well, but I've no doubt you deserve better than that.
Personally, I'd be going to meetings with phones programmed to call the other phones in my many pockets. Bring a party popper or two and maybe one of those rape alarms. See how the unfair dismissals claim goes.-- Custardguts, Aug 24 2009 "[navigatr85], you may want to check into your nearest mental hospital. You actually understood everything I meant." I'll take that as a compliment. :)
Now that I think about it, slapping a phone in your pocket would actually be very different from dropping it on the floor, in terms of physics. When you drop a phone on the floor, it's a collision at a much higher velocity, which means much higher kinetic energy, which means more energy to damage the phone. When you slap a phone in your pants pocket, the velocity of your hand is what's important, and your hand wouldn't be moving as fast as the phone would be moving during a drop. Imagine someone holding a cell phone five feet above your leg and dropping it directly onto your leg. That would hurt a lot. That's similar to accidentally dropping the phone on the floor from a height of five feet. But if you slap yourself on the leg, you wouldn't slap hard enough to cause yourself that much pain. [Well, maybe blissmiss would. :) Just kidding.]
Also, some of the energy of the slap would be absorbed by your leg and your hand, since they're not very rigid. But the floor, being very rigid, would absorb very little energy, putting more energy into damaging the phone.
"I got placed on 90-day probation for my phone's alarm going off, and I silenced it very quickly." "I got chastised for using my phone to call 911 when a coworker had a siezure." "But the pay and hours make the job too valuable to give up over something so petty." If you ask me, I wouldn't put up with that kind of treatment at a job, unless the pay and the hours were REALLY good, like, say, 15 hours a week and a six-figure salary. (That would average out to about $130 an hour.) But, to each his own. I'm digressing.-- navigatr85, Aug 25 2009 I'm trying to figure out how you can smack yourself on the leg in a meeting without drawing attention to yourself.-- Ling, Aug 25 2009 Money or time has nothing to do with being paid to halfbake for hours.-- daseva, Aug 25 2009 Hmmm... party popper cell phones...-- RayfordSteele, Aug 25 2009 Who besides me has a visual of [21] doing all night experiments, trying to disprove this idea?-- blissmiss, Aug 25 2009 Speed is only part of the equation, 21.-- daseva, Aug 25 2009 "You said to slap the phone 'really hard'. Those are your words, Navigatr." Yes, I said "really hard", but I didn't mean hard enough to cause intense pain to your own leg and hand. Looking back, I made a bad choice of words when I said "really hard". The reason I said that was because I wanted to emphasize that the phone wouldn't be silenced by a gentle bump, like bumping into a wall or another person.
"Try clocking the speed of a falling cellphone, then the speed of a slapping hand. I guarantee the hand is moving faster." I don't have any devices to measure the speed of an object. But I did some rough calculations, and I got that the cell phone would be moving at about 12.2 miles per hour when it hits the ground, if it's dropped from 5 feet. Now, it IS possible for a human hand to move faster than than that. For example, in pro baseball, pitches are often clocked at 90 mph, which means the the pitcher's hand is also moving at about that speed when he releases the ball. But just because people CAN slap themselves hard, that doesn't mean they WILL. A person could slap at 90 mph if they wanted to, but they could also slap at 8 mph if they wanted to. You can't "guarantee the hand is moving faster", because slaps can be done at many different speeds. So what I'm saying is, the cell phone could be designed so that the required slapping force would be more than a gentle bump, but still less than a painful injury.-- navigatr85, Aug 29 2009 random, halfbakery