TEXTING AND DRIVING IN SUFFOLK DON’T MIX
By David Lion Rattiner

Using a cell phone and driving a car has proven to be some serious trouble. Today, a police officer will pull you over and give you a ticket if you are caught talking on your cell phone without a hands-free headset. This state law is in place because a lot of people were killing themselves in their cars after they became too distracted from the road with a phone held to their ear. Driving with one hand and talking is dangerous.

But what about dialing?

Well, dialing the phone number, no matter how you look at it, is going to take fingers. There is no real hands free way of punching in a telephone number. The same thing can be said for text messaging. After all, text messaging takes just as much effort as dialing only it takes a little longer. It is, however, more distracting after the text messaging begins. As a result, there is now legislation lined up to make text messaging while driving illegal.

If you have ever text messaged before, you know what I mean. You might spell the word wrong, you get confused where the letters match up with the numbers, you have to scroll through a series of menus before you can actually send out the message, and God forbid you try to enter in a bad word using the predictive text button. Getting good at texting takes a little practice.

So it would make sense to ban it from driving. And that is exactly what Suffolk County is trying to do. Our local legislator, Jay Schneiderman of Montauk, has proposed the ban. There have already been reports of people getting killed because a driver was texting.

First of all, I’m going to state my opinion on both driving while talking on the cell phone with only one hand free and the proposal of driving while texting as far as I personally am concerned.

I am completely capable of doing both things. It is just the other morons that aren’t. Yeah, I get angry when I see a moron on the road texting or chatting away without using a headset or texting, but those are the stupid people that drive. ME, I’M SPECIAL. I CAN WALK AND CHEW GUM!

Whew.

Anyway, the ban will most likely go through because there are lives at stake. However, I sure want to see how cops enforce this law, because dialing is legal and it is impossible to tell the difference between dialing a phone number and texting a short message, unless you are really close to the driver. So if a person gets pulled over, they can say that they were just in the middle of dialing a phone number, and were going to use a headset to make a call, to get out of the ticket.

I have faith in the goodness of people when they are asked to be good, and I am for this ban, even though I don’t like it, because you know what? Texting while driving is ducking dangerous (avid texters will get this joke).

Yes, I’m going to let this text rule slide, even though I hate new rules. However, if next year they start telling us coffee drinking is banned, I will go crazy. You could make an argument that coffee drinking is distracting. I’m sure somebody has been killed because of it. Ever try to drive a stick and eat a cheeseburger? Good luck.

We may need to develop hands free coffee mugs and “driving only” meals. Perhaps an IV in your car that you can setup that injects you with the coffee while driving, or perhaps a really long straw so that you can suck down some liquefied Big Macs on the roof.

It may come to that one day and I can tell you this, if they take away my coffee drinking rights in this state I will assemble a rally so big you will think you are back in the 60s. I’d either do that or just get a really long straw, perhaps one of those beer hats…

I digress.

Blackberry boys and girls will just have to suck it up and actually, gulp, make a phone call with a hands free headset or buy a bicycle and text message on that. I’m sure that will be much safer.