The future blindsides us more often than we realize. I remember watching Star Trek, where it was assumed that one thing we would have 200 years from now is a little communicator that flipped open.

As far as I know, nobody saw the cell phone phenomenon coming back then.

Okay, maybe some obscure genius thirty years ago did predict handheld phones in the hands of even schoolchildren. Now, if someone had told him that one of the most common things people would be doing with this wonderful portable phone is...typing messages to each other using the letters on the dial face!

IMO, that's the real mind-blower. It's as though after radio was developed to the point where voice transmission was a mature technology, people continued to communicate by tapping Morse code on the microphones. It doesn't make sense, but there it is.

The annoyance with public cell-phone talkers is also weird. Somehow, the human brain can filter out two people at a restaurant table talking to each other, but if we're just hearing one side of the conversation, it grates on us somehow. Why? I've paid close attention--someone on a phone isn't talking any louder than they would be to someone across the table. There's some brain perception thing going on here.

(I'm not talking about phone use in places where even normal conversation is inappropriate, like theaters).