Ok, you can hear me now. But, watch out!

A few months ago, I was loitering around in a different university campus, killing time before it was time for my guest lecture at a class.  A girl, well, young woman, rushed into the building while texting.  And she rushed into the elevator.

Nothing wrong, you say, eh.

She promptly jumped out of the elevator, and then looked around as if to get a bearing of where she was.  And then she entered the room that was adjacent to the elevator.

She was so keen on her texting while walking that she hurriedly entered the elevator thinking that was the classroom!

And once a guy nearly bumped into me because he was so fixated on the texting.  Last week, when driving near the campus parking lot where I park, I waited at the intersection for the longest time because I was not sure whether the woman with one foot off the sidewalk was indeed going to cross the road.  I figured it was safer to wait than to test my brakes as she jumped in front of a moving car.

Of course, I am not the only one who has been observing such smartphone behavior.  The Scientific American reports:

In 2004 an estimated 559 people had, in one scenario, whacked themselves hard enough on a telephone pole to need emergency room treatment. By 2010 the number of walkers who had to finish that last text in the ER had likely topped 1,500, according to the study, which appeared in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention.
During the same time period, the total numbers of pedestrians who wound up in emergency rooms actually decreased. Cell phone–related pedestrian injuries are thus doing yeoman's work in keeping our ER docs in business.

The smartphone zombies!

So, what can we expect here?

Experts expect the injury toll related to phones to keep rising. “If current trends continue, I wouldn't be surprised if the number of injuries to pedestrians caused by cell phones doubles again between 2010 and 2015,” said Ohio State University's Jack Nasar, a co-author of the study, in a press release. And he thinks that the official numbers are probably underestimates of the true injury rate because not everyone who gets hurt goes to the hospital and not everyone who goes admits the real reason that they walked into a fire hydrant.

So, the whole idea of walking on two feet was to eventually end up bumping against the fire hydrant because the other two "legs" were needed for texting.  Ah, evolution!