In preparation for California’s new hands-free cell phone law on July 1st, I finally broke down and bought a bluetooth wireless device.
Well, I actually bought my second bluetooth wireless device. I had bought one a couple of years ago, found it to be terribly annoying and not very useful and quite promptly lost it. This time I bought one of the more advanced models, the Jawbone, and I find it to be terribly annoying and not very useful. The good news is I haven’t lost it yet.
For the last week or so, I’ve been walking around with this thing in my ear trying to get used to it. What I find is that I am significantly more distracted using this thing than I ever was either holding the phone in my hand or using the speakerphone. First I had to try two different earpieces and three different earbuds till I got a set that seems to sort of fit my ear somewhat. Then I have managed to either disconnect people who call, call people I don’t mean to, or try to talk out of the phone when the call goes to the headset or vice versa. I can’t figure out how to make the volume go up and down in real time, and any advanced features are way beyond me.
This has got to be the law of unintended consequences to the max. Here’s the story. I do believe there are some people who are very distracted when they talk on the cell phone, and many of these people talk and drive at the same time. I’ve seen them and so have you. However, I don’t for a second believe that these folks will be any less distracted because they have this thing in their ear.
I also believe that these are the same people who long before cell phones were distracted by everything from the car radio to their kids in the back seat, reading the paper, looking at a map or GPS, etc. In other words, some people are just plain distracted. These are also the folks who probably can’t multitask on even simple tasks. That’s ok. They can work serially one task at a time.
The rest of us who can multitask fairly well and are even wired to perform better when we’re multitasking are now stuck with a regulation that makes our lives more complicated and IMO less safe.
The CHP is supposedly sitting with baited breath just waiting to start citing people who are not hands-free next Tuesday. I just hope they will also take the time to stop all those people who are distracted by other things beyond cell phones, as well as those who are incapacitated and really shouldn’t be driving in the first place. But it might be too distracting to ask them to focus on more than one thing at a time.
