Cell phones are the bane of the current times.

Case in point: I was flying back from Hyderabad to Bangalore and the moment we landed several cellphones started ringing. Not too bad, always happens, I hear you say. Agreed. Let's move on. We board the bus that takes us from the aircraft to the terminal (though it's only a few steps away and most people on the flight were perfectly capable of walking or so it seemed). A gentleman not only started talking loudly on his phone but proceeded to conduct an entire business meeting on the bus in the clear audience of everyone present evoking all sorts of emotions from the fellow passengers from irritation to chuckles to amusement. Remember this was 9pm in the night. This meeting didn't stop as we disembarked at the terminal but proceeded full blown as we went to the baggage claim and onto the exit. While I understand the necessity of having late night meetings given the global nature and hard deadlines etc, I really don't understand the rationale behind holding it in an airline bus and trying to out-shout the roar of engines. Couldn't he have explained to whoever it was on the other side, that he was just getting off a plane and he would call back in say 30 mins, when he ould be in the relative calm and quiet of his cab? I can even understand if we was actually firefighting and trying to keep the services up 24 X 7, I would have given that much leeway to him, but this was a purely business talk (like proposal, teams etc) and I really don't see any deadline that is shorter than 30 mins that would be impacted by this.
Now, thinking retrospectively about why this happened, I can only attribute it to the existence of this ubiquitous-always-on-your-life cellphone. Now imagine the same without a cellphone. The meeting would never have happened. Would this result in him losing an important client, probably not. The sole reason the meeting took place was not because of timezone, not because it was urgent to be dealt with right away but because cellphone exists and enables communication. Does it add significant value to the conversation, no!!! It just makes us more spur-of-the-moment, I-want-this-done-right-away-simply-because-I-can-and-not-because-I-need/have-to kind of people. To all those people who immediately relate themselves to our unknown gentleman, all I can say is, people lived, communicated, socialized much much before the advent of cellphones and probably did a better job at it than we do now.