In an epic incident of the pot calling the kettle rude, a Tigard, Oregon woman said she felt "disrespected" after police escorted her from an Amtrak train mostly because she refused to get off her cellphone — for 16 hours.
Lakeysha Beard was charged with disorderly conduct after police said she got into a verbal altercation with passengers on the train. The other passengers complained she refused to put down her cellphone, even after train staff made repeated announcements for passengers to not use cellphones, according to police.When a passenger confronted her about her loud talking, police said Beard got aggressive. She had reportedly been talking non-stop on the phone since getting on the train in Oakland, Calif.Beard was taken into custody until a family member could come and pick her up.
Beard's rudeness wasn't accommodated by some unknown super phone, but by Amtrak's handy cellphone charging stations.
In a follow-up interview with KATU.com, Beard confirmed she was blathering away on her mobile device, but that "she didn't understand why she had to be escorted off the train."
Like many communal commuter-based agencies, Amtrak does have a policy against obnoxious blathering, specifically in "quiet cars" like the one Beard was annoying her fellow passengers in, again, for 16 hours.
Just in case the severity of Beard's increasingly pervasive crime isn't obvious to all readers, KATU.com also took the time to consult social etiquette expert and instructor Jodi Blackwood, who confirmed that "too many people don't exercise basic courtesy when it comes to using their phones."
According to KATU.com, Blackwood went on to say that when people speak too loudly and have personal conversations in public places, they don't always realize the message they're sending.
"What does that say to them? It says that you're only thinking of yourself and that you are only aware of what you need and what you are doing and you are a less considerate person," Blackwood said.
Not for nothing, Beard doesn't seem like the sort to actually care what her cellphone screeching says to anyone but the person on the other end.
With all due respect to Blackwood's social etiquette expertise, Columbia University forensic psychiatrist Michael Stone might've made a more apt consultant for this particular crime. He's the dude who created the 22-point "Scale of Evil," which is further grouped into three distinctive tiers: Impulsive evil-doers, people who lack extreme psychopathic features, but may be psychotic, and finally, the profoundly psychopathic i.e. "They have no remorse for what they've done to other people."
Given that Stone's scale is inspired by Dante's circles of hell, the punishment imagined by Gawker's Seth Abramovitch seems most apt:
She was later charged with unspeakable crimes against humanity and sentenced to life on some distant planet where there are no reception bars, ever. (Or maybe it was just a disorderly conduct charge.) via More on the annoying way we live now:Frustrated dad's Facebook status now No. 1 on AmazonPlanking: A Facebook fad to die for?Don't forget! Your computer job is still killing youHelen A.S. Popkin also believes that people who blather on their mobile devices while on public transportation are the worst people in the world. Join her on and/or , won't you?