Fernando Zulueta has an opinion on the use of cellphones at work: He loves it. Zulueta, 46, who owns a chain of charter schools in South Florida, scratches out the land-line number on his business cards so people won't use it to call him. If he is in a business meeting and his cellphone rings, he often picks it up, even though he considers such behavior annoying.
"I regret to say it," he said, speaking over one of his several cellphones, "but you see your caller ID flashing, and it happens to be a mayor or a state representative, and you say, `I'm sorry, I really have to take this call,' and you take it."
But it doesn't have to be a mayor. Recently, Zulueta interrupted a meeting to take a call from a bed deliveryman: "I like to be accessible. And I see things moving faster and faster in that direction." He said he is frustrated by people who have his cell number but call his land line anyway. "They feel they can only call the cell in an emergency," he said sadly.
Robin Reinhardt also has an opinion on cellphones at work: She hates them. Reinhardt, a vice president in charge of booking guests on MTV, prefers that people think they can call her cellphone only in an emergency. People who call her cell thinking it's more direct than going through her assistant annoy her no end.
"I'm here at my desk with three lines ringing, and people call me on my cell," she said, speaking over a land line from Los Angeles. "I get crazy."
In the great American debate about cellphone etiquette, some of the early turf battles seem to be settled, with winners and losers falling into camps familiar from Western Civ classes. Movie theaters, funerals and libraries appear to have been carried by the cell Rousseauists, who believe the social contract forbids such things as shouting intimate details into a piece of plastic in a room full of strangers.
Public transportation systems, on the other hand, appear to belong to the cell Hobbesians, who believe that since life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, there's no need to give the rider engrossed in her newspaper in the seat next to you a quiet commute. Restaurants constitute a middle ground, in a state of detente. Everyone knows it's rude to use a cellphone at dinner, but civilized people do it anyway.
The workplace, though, remains unsettled territory. "This is the next area," said Peggy Post, director of the Emily Post Institute and an author of The Etiquette Advantage in Business. Post, who often lectures business groups about cell use, spoke over a land line from her home office on the Florida Gulf Coast.
"We're hearing more and more stories about cellphones in the workplace," Post said, with no suggestion that any of those stories might be celebratory.
The points of friction, as Post and others describe them, are numerous: the executive who takes a cell call in the middle of a meeting; the phones that blast impossible-to-ignore ring tones in a busy office; the seminar leader who interrupts his speech to take a call on his cell; the co-worker who, like clockwork, answers hers to discuss lunch choices with a child.
Reinhardt's list of cellphone abusers includes her fiance and even her broker. "I've told him a thousand times," she said. "`Call me on my work phone.' He calls on the cell. I see his number flash, and I don't answer it. Ten minutes later he calls me on my work number."
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