White Collar Vulgarity

“Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.”
-- Eric Hoffer (1902 – 1983), American Writer and Social Critic

Could it be that the prescient Mr. Hoffer saw clearly to the BlackBerry era?

My job as an ad agency Creative Director requires at least five live client presentations every month. Each one is the culmination of weeks of research, dozens of speculative designs, thousands of miles of cramped flights and countless forlorn nights in express hotels. But the theatricality of the show itself – the buzz of performance, the excitement of my audience, the knowledge that what I've crafted has genuinely resonated – fully trumps the foregoing discomfort.

Then it happens. One of the executives to whom I'm presenting casually unclips his or her digital brick, stares down and engages in the familiar thumb gyrations.

I’ll leave it to others to decry our social transition from tête-à-tête to tap-tap-tap. Mine is a more specific argument. I fully acknowledge that the BlackBerry (one of which I own, so don’t paint me as some digital-averse freak) is a remarkable tool, at once serving all inbound/outbound communication and entertainment needs. But its use in the aforementioned scenario is vulgar beyond compare. Worse still, it appears to be increasingly accepted as “the way business is today.” Is one hour of undivided attention too much to ask? Has the need to appear important overtaken basic civility?

Enough is enough.

The next time a busier-than-thou jerk looks down at their BlackBerry while you are presenting (or merely speaking in a smaller setting) I suggest three potential steps to forever eradicate their rudeness:

1) Without breaking your verbal stride, approach the offending party and stare directly at them.
2) If that doesn’t rouse them from their device torpor, stop talking altogether and see how long it takes for the silence to work its awkward magic.
3) If that still doesn’t do the trick, say the following in the most sickly polite manner: “I’m terribly sorry that our presentation has gotten in the way of your critical e-mail. Please let us know when you’ve finished and we’ll happily continue.”