Dec 27, 2019 3 min read

The last thing the Heinz Hall announcer said before the lights went down was this:

“Please silence your cellphones.”

I had already done so, having flipped the skinny little tab on the side of the phone from on to off. With that easy bit of a tech task complete, I put the phone in my bag and settled back into my seat to enjoy some Christmas music.

Two-thirds of the way through “Sleigh Ride,” the bells started ringing, and I don’t mean the ones coming from the percussion section of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. The ringing was coming from the row of seats directly behind us. And it kept on ringing.

The farmer and I craned our necks to the side, as anyone would do, wondering what the heck the problem was. The four people behind us were fumbling around, handing the phone from one set of hands to the next. Back and forth the phone went as the ringing continued. None of them knew how to silence the thing.

And then the ringing stopped. Good, we thought. They’ve figured it out.

But no.

Two songs later, the ringing started again. Whomever that was who called them two songs ago must have decided to give it another try. Again, the fumbling commenced as the four hapless concertgoers passed the phone from hand to hand, on down the line, trying to make it stop.

A girl scout campfire song came to mind just then, the one in which we would sing “Dollar, dollar, how you wander, from the one hand to the other.” Only in this case it wasn’t a nice, silent coin being passed around but a noisy cellphone.

The phone rang until the person on the other end of the line gave up and hung up.

Technology can be tricky, especially for those of us whose brains were not wired with it. I’ve been told I’m guilty of something called “Mom-Timing.” While FaceTiming my son in Los Angeles, I heard him and his girlfriend giggling.

“Wha…?” I said, as I held the phone in front of me.

“You’re doing the Mom thing,” my son said. “You hold the phone too close and all we can see are your eyebrows and your forehead.”

I suppose that despite our best efforts, we baby boomers will always be a little out of touch as far as our children are concerned. As will the generation ahead of us.

Before the concert was over, the phone would ring once more – during of all things, “The Carol of the Bells,” performed with great athletic prowess by the fantastic Three Rivers Ringers.

Some of those bells are the size of suitcases. What a workout.

By then, the farmer and I were audibly rolling our eyes at the clueless nature of these goofballs behind us. Finally, the ringing became muffled. I think someone finally sat on the phone to shut it up.

Driving home, the farmer and I talked about what will forever be known as the Christmas Phone Fiasco of 2019.

“One more time, and I was going to grab the phone and turn it off for them,” he said. Good guy that he is, he would have been nice about it, and maybe after the show, would have given them a quick lesson on silencing a phone by flipping the little toggle switch on the side.

Because this time of year, especially, we all deserve a little peace in the concert hall – and on Earth.