On 6 Aug 2003 17:57:00 GMT, davehinz (AT) spamcop (DOT) net wrote:

I would try to procede as above when possible.



Dave
Five minutes? I thought that Simon Legree was fictional.
My wife started with IBM upon graduation and has been in the field for
ever!!! She has worked throught the world starting with Poughkeepsie
and Endicott. Five minutes ????????????

Malcolm Mason <MWM1 (AT) xxxxJHU (DOT) edu> wrote:
I am no fan of oblivious drivers yakking on their cellphone and not paying
attention to the road.

However, as the father of two small kids, I can assure you a couple of
unruly rugrats in the back seat can be far, FAR more distracting than
talking on the phone. Are we to make it illegal to drive with children?

For that matter, engaging in a conversation with the person sitting next to
you can be nearly as distracting as talking on the phone. When you're
talking to a passenger you don't have to hold or dial a phone, but on the
other hand on the phone you're not tempted to look at the other person for
visual cues. Should it be illegal to speak at all while driving?

Careless driving while talking on a cellphone is a Bad Thing. But careless
driving for ANY reason is a Bad Thing, and cellphones are far from the
worst cause. I don't think it makes sense to legislate against one small
part of the problem while totally ignoring the rest of it.

Gary

Someone who looks an awful lot like Spyderman <spyderman (AT) noneofyourbusiness (DOT) com> wrote:
Odd, I thought I had that one in the killfile... easy enough to fix.

Xenna wrote:

So, does anyone have any first hand experience with the BT carkit option
of the new Saab's?

(I think the flames have died out...)

X.

Someone who looks an awful lot like 'nuther Bob <yetanotherphonyaddress (AT) noplacereally (DOT) com> wrote:

I did that once - the cop who stopped to see what was up was truly
puzzled as to why someone would pull over to take a phone call.

Well, who knows. There was a just a study that I saw on cnn.com which
listed cellphones way down on the list of driving distractions. Of
course, for any study that says (x), you can find another that
says the opposite of (x), so who knows. Probably comes down to
this - some people can handle distractions of whatever kind, and
stay safe, while others are unsafe with any type of distraction.
Of course, everyone thinks they're in the first category.

Dave Hinz

davehinz (AT) spamcop (DOT) net writes:
My first reaction to reading the above was that five minute response
time is ludicrous. There's very little in this world except medical
emergencies and ballistic missile defense where a few minutes one way
or another will be of any significance. IT is certainly NOT one of
the fields where realtime response is critical.

My second thought was if you respond, what good does it do? It
would not be possible to take notes or do much of anything more than
maybe record a message. If you're going to record a message, you
might as well just use voicemail and not even answer the calls.

And even if there is something that can be done via a telephone call,
anything beyond the most trivial is going to require some concentration
and thought which is going to be quite if not totally distracting to
job 1, operating your vehicle. Reckless disregard for others is a
criminal offense in the worst-case scenario.

A later response by Mr. Hinz indicates that the five-minute thing
determines whether the next person on the list of trouble-shooters
gets called. The solution is simple: Let them call someone else
while you're driving.

Someone who looks an awful lot like Everett M. Greene <mojaveg (AT) iwvisp (DOT) com> wrote:
OK, I have an hour drive time. Even if I had a 55-minute response time
limit, it's still less time than my drive takes. Same question/problem/
situation, isn't it? I suppose if it was 30 minutes, I could turn around
to answer the page, but that's not all that realistic, is it.

It is when the people who pay my salary lose many dollars per second that
the site is down. If I don't respond, the next person on the list gets
called 5 minutes later, and so on. If each of us had 30 minutes to not
respond, it could be many, many lost seconds before someone started working
on the problem.

The point, however, illustrates that there may be real needs to be
reachable. The mere act of being on a cellphone isn't the problem,
it's the act of being on a cellphone and being reckless that is. This is
the whole eternal "bad thing" vs. "bad person" argument - the appropriate,
vs. the inappropriate, use of tools.

"I acknowlege the page and will have an update in (number) of minutes".
The nature of these calls will be something like "The ordersystem is
not responding", or "Transactions to/from (institution) are not coming
through".

Is this about our Service Level Agreement, or about bad driving?

Then we effectively have two people on call at the same time, who then
have to stagger their drive times so that both are not driving at the
same time. Sorry, but that's not a change I'm willing to make, to avoid
a once a month phone call to me while I'm driving, which will take
one percent of that drivetime to deal with.

Dave Hinz