Dear Lady I Recently Encountered At An Event I Attended With My Son,

Hello there. You don’t know me, but I recently became fascinated with you and your particular brand of mania. We were in the same room the other night, attending a choir rehearsal for our children in which we had been invited by the choir’s administration to both observe what they were teaching our kids, and to find out important information and ask questions about the season’s progress.

I noticed you in the crowd, although I’m pretty certain that you never gave me a second thought. We were in that room for two hours while our children learned music, practiced scales, raised their hands to answer questions, laughed at the engaging efforts of the choir’s wonderful conductor and assistant, and merrily participated in an activity expressly designed to grow their minds and talents.

But I’m wondering if you caught any of that at all, because you were sitting there texting on your phone. The entire time. I mean seriously: THE ENTIRE TIME.

I’m a little embarrassed at how distracting you were to me, and how fascinated I became at your incredible dedication to the texting arts. At one point I estimated that your nimble fingers were flying across the keypad for four out of every five minutes. Even in the final part of the evening’s rehearsal – when the entire point of parents being present was being directly addressed by the group’s administrative officers – you continued to show no interest, no emotion, no engagement and no attention, other than that to which you paid your phone and its precious buttons and scrollbar.

It just occurred to me: perhaps you were taking notes the entire time, so as to recall later on all of the salient points that were shared, to jot down the exact moment that your child maybe raised his or her hand to triumphantly answer a question. But that probably wouldn’t explain why your texting even continued during the group’s break.

Or you must be a person of extreme importance and impact, and your two-hour absence from coworkers, family or friends is so unthinkable, so devastating in its ability to create a Not-You vacuum that the only solution would be your continued connection and presence via hastily-scribed, omnipresent, text-stream.

I’ve got it: you’re a brain surgeon, allowed a single night off the job to enjoy a night of children and music, yet instead you were disturbed by a final-hour call of desperation from another surgical team in the OR, you their only lifeline to stave off a tricky complication or mid-procedure anomaly. And your feverish texting just may have saved someone’s life.

Or it could be that same scenario, only you’re like the guy in the 70s Airport movies where you’re the only person who can help land! that! plane!

Of course, none of those guesses explain why you wouldn’t just, you know, not come to the rehearsal. Or step outside while you’re texting. Or maybe – crazy, I know – turn the phone off and put it aside, just for two hours, while your kid was nearby learning something pretty spectacular.

I enjoy being a connected guy. I take as much advantage as I can to monitor websites, RSS, Twitter, comments, email, analytics – I dig all of that. I understand the excitement, the motivation, the rush of real-time communication in a digital age. It’s cool, heady stuff. And you’re probably a far more important person than I am, with bigger responsibilities and expectations of your time than me, so I probably have no business making such assumptions.

But quite simply: I don’t get it. The most connected among us must be able – and must be encouraged – to put the thing down for more than a minute. We should never reach a point where our reliance on these tools creates a higher value on connecting online than a roomful of connections instead.