Yes, that’s right.

Because even though I’m wearing a Bluetooth cell phone ear-piece head-set cancer-causing electronic lobe-hanger doesn’t mean that my code name is Desert Fox or that I’m constantly in contact with FBI agents who are securing the perimeter. It doesn’t mean that “the eagle has landed” is about to land or may be landing sometime in the near future.

And it definitely doesn’t mean that I’m a shuttle commander — and the same goes for you.

Yet when I walk into a restaurant or a lunch establishment or the post office or some other public place with my Lobaphone hanging from my ear, with the flashing flourescent blue light flash flash flashing away — everyone else must assume that I think I am the most important person on the planet. That, in the event of global warming taking a turn for the worse or the aliens finally deciding to nuke the planet or the, yes…Shuttle, careening towards Cape Canaveral with no hope in sight — that fortunately while I am eating my bean burrito that contact with me will always be possible.

Via my wonderfully annoying-looking Bluetooth cell phone ear-piece Borg acoutrament.

I think at first, the appeal has to do with the whole hands free thing. You know, we’re all moving towards that place in the evolution of society where we don’t want to have to use our hands for anything anyway. One day, the phone will ring (in our ears), we will say something like “answer the phone”, the phone will be answered, we will talk through our earpiece, have someone feeding us food pellets while it’s happening and be urinating in our own attached (yet hidden) plastic bag on the inside of our clothes — all the while swinging our free hands in the air and proclaiming “my hands are freeeeeeeeeeeee, my hands are free at last!”

But until that point… Until that almost unreal moment in our development… Until living our lives requires zero hand manipulation whatsoever… Can we give up on the hands-free ear piece speaker thing until we really, desperately have a need for one?

Don’t get me wrong — I deviated off the path of proper, sane cell phone etiquette somewhere between purchasing my Bluetooth lobaphone and actually putting it away in a drawer forever after being assaulted by non-lobaphone owning hooligans. I walked into places of business saying “hello” and having no one around me knowing if I was talking to them or the voices in my head. I had sat across from people at a lunch, worn my Shuttle Commander ear-corder and said things like, “I’d like some assistance please,” only to have my close friends coordinate an intervention when in reality I was just asking for the local Blockbuster Video number, over my earpiece, via 411.

The confusion was too great for this wannabe Shuttle Commander.

And so I put my earwig into the drawer and forever swore off the use of my wireless, Bluetooth ear piece cell phone hands free no-soul cancer causing foolproof foolish device. I left it there and continue to leave it there for fear of feeling the excitement well up again inside of me at the thought of hands-free wireless communication without any physical excursion whatsoever. I have sworn it off forever, at the thought of people thinking of me as “above the law.” I have removed the earpiece in the hopes that people will know, 100% for sure, if I am talking to them while I am standing directly next to them.

I have given up on being that spy and that FBI agent and that Shuttle Commander, all in the hopes that I can make the world a better, more communicative place without having to use a crutch to make that happen.

No, I’m no Shuttle Commander.

And neither are you.