The Consumerist reported yesterday that a Vermont deli imposed a new surcharge for its customers warning in a sign that “$3 will be added to your total if you fail to GET OFF YOUR PHONE while at the counter. IT’S RUDE.“
We at NotTheWorstNews were just as surprised as you were to learn that there’s cell phone coverage in Vermont! Wikipedia’s Vermont entry sums it up best:
Generally, cell phone coverage in the state outside of the major metropolitan areas is weak due to interference from mountains.
We at NotTheWorstNews were just as surprised as you were to learn that there are major metropolitan areas in Vermont! The largest city, Burlington, has about 42,000 people, which means that with an attendance of 44,041, more people attended yesterday’s White Sox-Yankees game at Yankee Stadium than live in Vermont’s largest city. And you can bet if anyone ever tried to tell a New Yorker in the Bronx that they had to pay $3 for talking on the phone while ordering a sandwich, Larry David would have written an episode of Seinfeld about it.
But due to vague reporting, we don’t know where this “deli” is, or if the few people passing through town are excited to finally have phone reception so they can call their friends and tell them about how excited they are to see real, friendly people in barren Vermont. Anyway, if you have been charged the 3 bucks, we remind you, it could be worse, so here are 3 worse places to get charged for talking on your cell phone.
1. The Bathroom of An Office Building. We are surprised how often we hear Monopoly-style real estate deals going on in men’s rooms. No sounds of flushing, or anything else that would guarantee the person on the other end of the line knew where they were being called from seems to deter these bathroom-callers who must be in the 1%. And we mean the 1% of people who think we want to hear that somebody just offered $3 million for a property on Ventnor Avenue while we try to figure out what symphony conductor hand gestures are necessary to operate the hands free hand-drier. That said, it would be pretty bad to get charged a bunch of coins for using an office building bathroom. This isn’t a washroom in a McDonald’s in Finland, you know.
2. The Nokia Headquarters in Finland. As more and more people switch from Nokia devices to iPhones and Androids, it sure would suck if someone charged you $3 for using your Nokia Lumia too loudly while you were standing in the Nokia R&D facility, trying to explain to Nokia’s CEO on the phone why nobody is buying Nokia phones. We wonder if a Vermont-deli-style Finland-wide phone-talking surcharge is what lead to Nokia’s demise in the first place. (We would have also accepted the headquarters of Blackberry maker The Research In Motion in Waterloo, Canada after the stock price tanked today. Apparently some members of the public realized they want fewer phones that look like a prize out of a 1970s cereal box, and more real antioxidant blackberries on their cereal).
3. The International Space Station. Seriously, you’ve been isolated on this thing with a small group of international co-workers since April and one of them wants to charge you 97 Rubles for making a phone call while you grab a freeze-dried shrimp cocktail, served with horseradish-infused powdered sauce? But, in fairness to your Russian co-worker, if you can’t get some peace and quiet in outer space, where do you have to go?
We’re crossing our fingers for the people from Waterloo, Canada that the answer is not a Blackberry factory in a few years, but rather a library in Vermont. Because if charging you $3 is the state-wide Vermonter way of saying “Shhhhhhh!” we don’t even want to see what you’d get charged in one of their libraries for arguing that you didn’t return a Vermont Sandwich Recipe Book late.
Ever hear a conversation you didn’t need to hear from someone on a cell phone in a public place? Comment below!
