Driving with a Banana in your Ear
as in a cell phone or an MP3 player or whatever

There's been plenty of discussion about this being a hazard. Some people insist it's not. Sorry, but they are just being stupid.

There are two different kinds of things happening when you're driving with a phone in your hand: distraction and impairment. You can be dangerously distracted by the phone conversation even if you have a headset or hands-free speakerphone. Distraction can happen for other reasons, including havine a good time with friends in your car, daydreaming, absorption with music, and (God forbid!) watching television while driving.

And of course now there's this GPS business. Trying to find an address intently such that you can't find the road. Remind me to tell you a story about GPS.

Impairment is the other thing, and it is not insignificant. If you have ice cream in your hand, you are impaired. If you have a phone in your hand, you are impaired. But there's more than that. If you have a phone held up to your ear, you are doubly impaired. That seemingly simple thing takes a lot of your brain off the road.

I have not had a cell phone myself for several years but when I had one I was one of those "early adopters" of the headset. Not because anybody told me I should, but because it was almost instantly obvious that when I was on the phone, I was a hazard on the road, for several reasons. The thing that really caught me up was recognizing the 'hand-ear' impairment.

The headset thing was so easy, and the benefit was so obvious, that I'm incredulous how many people don't think they need to do this. Including the ditzy chick who driving into the plaza the wrong way one day recently, and heading right for me ... But then 85 percent of drivers think they are better than average.

It was a big load off my mind when I switched. Either way you can pull over when you need to make a call, and if you are trying to dial while driving I hope you get busted. But you can't control when incoming calls come at you, and just letting them all go to voice mail is just kinda not what's happening. What I did was to put the phone on automatic answer, count to five when it rang, and say hello.

It works. Try it.