IRAQ: Hey, buddy, keep it down!!! Please

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

The scene was straight from a New York cafe, only this was Baghdad.

Some coffee drinkers at one table were chatting with me about current events when a cellphone rang. It belonged to a man at a nearby table. He answered it and lapsed into the habit many people have while speaking on cellphones: bellowing down the line as if conversing with someone at the other end of a long tunnel.

As the man’s voice blasted through the cafe, drowning out even the bad pop music blaring from a radio, the people at our table looked at each other in amazement. ‘He’s awfully loud,’ one said politely to nobody in particular.

Several of us looked at the woman seated with the bellowing man and motioned for her to quiet her companion. She smiled at us, nodded her head to say she understood, and told her companion to turn down the volume. He did so. Then, when he finished the conversation he turned around and looked at us.

I thought of how many times I had witnessed this scene in New York. Customers in cafes glaring at a cellphone blabber, the loud-mouth responding with a rude gesture or angry look, and the tension between the tables becoming thicker than the latte foam.

This time was different. The man smiled broadly, laughed, and apologized. The people at my table laughed in return and waved their hands as if to say ‘No problem!’ There was no angry muttering, no insults, no rolling of eyes.

I wondered how it could be that in New York, speaking unintentionally loudly on a cellphone can spark a near-brawl, yet in Baghdad, it is greeted with smiles and forgiveness.

One of my companions theorized that in New York, people have little to gripe about, so they seize on minor irritations and treat them as major offenses. In Baghdad, people contend with serious, life-and-death issues every day, so loud cellphone yakkers are easily tolerated, he said as we walked to the elevator.

As usual, it wasn’t working. And as usual, instead of griping to the building manager, we began walking up the four flights of stairs, grateful that this probably was the biggest inconvenience we would face that day.

— Tina Susman in Baghdad

Art credit: Openclipart.org