One has to be an utter idiot to try to talk on a cell phone and drive at the same time, but I am baffled and bemused by other practices associated with cell phones.  Chief among them is shopping and cell-phoning simultaneously.

As I was going through a rather large discount store the other day, I noticed almost a dozen customers who were carrying on a phone conversation as they shopped.  Since I wasn't in a hurry and since I believe that people who use cell phones in public places have relinquished their right to privacy, I eavesdropped on the side of the conversation that I could hear.  Not one of these calls was an emergency; not one related to the shopping task at hand.

I also noted that these people were very inefficient shoppers.  They sometimes lost track of where they were in the store and had to double back.  They grabbed stuff off the shelf without checking prices.  Sometimes they didn't even seem to look at what they were grabbing.  I had visions of people coming home with peas when they intended to get beans, or dog food when they had only a cat.  Even though I was going at an unhurried pace, I managed to collect two or three items in the time it took these jabbering multitaskers to collect one.

I surmise that, if they had separated the phone call and shopping as separate tasks, these people would have had enough time left over for a 30-minute nap.  This, I think, is the perfect example of why psychologists say that the human brain is more efficient if it focuses on one task at a time.  We're good at scratching our heads or rubbing our bellies, but most of us are hopeless at doing both at the same time.

No wonder so many people are stressed out.  Constant, or almost constant, multitasking is exhausting; it also, as I've illustrated, winds up consuming extra time that could be spent in restful intervals between tasks.

As I observe this behavior, I am anything but sympathetic.  If these people suffer from mental exhaustion because they choose, unnecessarily, to overload their neural circuitry by engaging in this kind of behavior, they deserve what they get.  When two shoppers' carts collide as both are talking on the phone, I do not feel sympathetic.  I laugh at their misfortune and restrain myself from telling them how annoying they can be as they wander about the store talking . . . talking . . . talking.