Starting next week, a handful of New York City subway stations will have cell phone service for AT&T and T-Mobile users. There has been plenty of talk about getting wireless service in the city’s subway stations, but it seemed like a pipe dream. Now that it’s about to become a reality, New Yorkers are already beginning to ponder the pros and cons of being able to babble away into cell phones while impatiently waiting for never-on-time trains.
Chelsea will be the first neighborhood to be blessed with this service, as the NY Times reports:
The pilot program will introduce cellphone reception to the C-E platforms at 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue and three other stations along West 14th Street: the A, C, E and L platforms at Eighth Avenue; the F, M and L platforms at Avenue of the Americas; and the Seventh Avenue station that serves the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 lines.
Once you’re in the train and riding through the tunnels, however, service will be disrupted. And if you’re a Verizon or Sprint customer, you’ll be out of luck, either way.
Now, the downside to all this, if it can even be considered one, is the annoyance of having to listen to people yap into their handsets while you try to get through your library copy of The Hunger Games since it was due like yesterday and you want to read the series before the movies come out so you can talk about how the books were so much better.
However, I don’t think it’s a problem at all. Here is a not comprehensive list of other crap I hear in the subways that I’d rather be rid of:
- Rappers/poets/preachers
- Out-of-tune guitars
- Violins
- Dan Baus
- Singers whose voices can be considered crimes against humanity
- “Can I interest you in a candy bar? Just one dollar.”
- A gaggle of unsupervised school children
- Pretentious and/or pedantic intellectuals discussing the deep, moral implications of the latest trending topics on Twitter
Then again, there is good evidence that listening to single-sided conversations (i.e. when you can only hear one speaker and, essentially, are listening to half a conversation) can be more annoying than listening to two people jabber on about how everything in New York is so New York.
[Via: NYT, photo credit]