lolgaxe wrote:
As an E6, I pretty much have to leave my phone on and charged at all times. I tell my Soldiers that if its an emergency to call three times. That's the only time I'll drop what I'm doing to check the phone. I also make it very clear that they'll regret it if they do that and it isn't important. If they want to text me, they can. If they want to call and BS, they can but they understand that I might not pick up because I'm busy.
If you're in the fucking military and are supposed to be in charge, make damn rules and stop being buddies with everyone. Not there to be your best damn friend. I'd tear into any soldier that tried to interrupt a movie I spent like twenty bucks on because they couldn't find a stapler.
This. Same thing applies in the civilian world. When you're young and stupid, you imagine that you and only you can solve all the problems around you. Then, when you get older and smarter, you realize that you aren't really being paid to be on call 24/7. You find you actually have to work at getting people to follow the correct procedures instead of just calling/paging you directly whenever they have a problem. And then you make it clear to those people that you're not on call 24/7, but that there are people who's jobs are to be on call at any given time, so freaking call them!
I say this somewhat jokingly, after one of our vendor's employees (so he doesn't even work for the same company I work for) called me last night to ask about proper grounding procedures for working on his home computer. Which is funny given the thread in the tech forum about the same thing which I posted on just last week. Here's the thing though. If I hadn't happened to have my phone on me, I wouldn't have answered it (and I certainly wouldn't have done so in a theater). And he wouldn't have had any problem if I hadn't. Life would have gone on. He'd have figured it out, or asked someone else, or in some other way solved his own problem. He understands that. I understand that. No one expects you go do more and you're stupid if you spend all your effort trying to do so.
Again though, this comes back to what we might define as an "emergency". I just can't see how anything so unimportant to you that you'd continue to sit through a movie before physically doing anything could possibly be important enough to have to send a text message back to someone
during that same movie.