Cell Phonies
An increasing number of people are reaching out and touching no one, writes Amy Harmon in The New York Times:

THE cashier had already rung up Keri Wooster's items when Ms. Wooster realized she didn't have her wallet. She dashed to her car and returned empty-handed to face the line of fidgeting customers she had kept waiting, a cellphone pressed to her ear. "Jordan, did you take my wallet out of my purse?" she asked in parental exasperation, as she made her way back to the checkout counter. "I'm holding up this line! You need to put things back where you find them."

Ms. Wooster, who has no children, was not actually talking to a Jordan, or indeed to anyone at all. But her monologue served its purpose, eliciting sympathetic looks from the frustrated crowd at her local Wal-Mart.

"My instincts just took over," Ms Wooster, 28, who lives in Houston, said later. "Everyone was like, 'Oh, kids.' "

Ms. Wooster is by no means alone in the practice of cellphone subterfuge. As cellular phone conversations have permeated public space, so, it seems, have fake cellular phone conversations.

How many? It is hard to say. But James E. Katz, a professor of communication at Rutgers University, says his classroom research suggests that plenty of the people talking on the phone around you are really faking it. In one survey Dr. Katz conducted, more than a quarter of his students said they made fake calls. He found the number hard to believe. Then in another class 27 of 29 students said they did it.

"People are turning the technology on its head," Dr. Katz said. "They are taking a device that was designed to talk to people who are far away and using it to communicate with people who are directly around them."

In case you are wondering, in between your shouting, for faux or real, into your cell phone, my hostility is entirely genuine.