Last Man Standing---Blue Tooth

Dignity clothes both the man of the hour and a man who can genuinely be called a man of his time. Likewise, modernity is served when a fresh mind couples his widespread learning with a vogueful stride. For stale and blunted is a task where the steel of innovation has been nicked. All men benefit from their forbears as well as the temporarily veiled work of their peers.

Several nascent applications of technology, however, may do more harm than good. Consider three businessmen recently observed casually dining and chatting. Bedecked with ear-pieces, these men ignored their physical proximity to each other while using Blue-tooth technology to further their workaday aims. This restorative lunch featured an historical comradery severed by a technology that prefers faceless conversations over warm-breathed goodwill. This mutation of the business lunch is obnoxious for several reasons.

First, the snail-like contraption wedged onto a man's ear appears as something akin to a bit jangling correctively in a horses mouth. Rather than purchaseable apparatus signaling status, modern cellular ear-pieces remind observers that the posturing individual is hard-wired into believing that their career is a remunerative, all encompassing deity.

Furthermore, opportunities lost to cipher non-verbal cues signaled by friends and colleagues will breed a fear of the fellow man in those who are used to communicate digitally.

Finally, the Blue-tooth headset, stoppered in one's ear like a rubber-shoved beaker, salutes would-be conversers as a plastic stop sign. Those interested in speaking to someone wearing a headset are put off by the outlandish blend of plastic and flesh. Sub-consciously, we wonder about robots and the interaction between computers and men.