Stop Wearing Your Goddamn Bluetooth Headset

Firstly, let’s tackle functionality. As mentioned before the jump, there are, in fact, people who truly need Bluetooth headsets. People who are indeed so busy that to use up an entire hand holding a phone is not an option for them – stock traders, newsroom journalists, and the like. But for every one person who actually benefits from a Bluetooth, there are roughly eight hundred who wear it purely for its aesthetic purposes, and for the inevitable techno-gasm that result s from buying any and every new piece of electronic gear solely for the purpose of seeming “ahead of the curve,” so to speak.

Quick newsflash:

You don’t need a Bluetooth.

You look stupid whilst using one.

Stop wearing them.

Yeah, I get it – you work, or you’re a student who should be working. You’re occasionally busy, and you often feel overwhelmed. I get that. But you are not, under any circumstances whatsoever, so damned busy that you can’t be arsed to hold a mobile phone to the side of your head. I have literally never seen someone wearing a Bluetooth whose hands were otherwise busy doing other things: more often than not, I’ve seen Bluetooth users walking around aimlessly, gesticulating wildly as they go through their almost-important conversation, essentially drawing attention to the fact that not only are they wearing an overly-expensive, hands-free earpiece, but also that they don’t really need to in the first place. You’ve got two hands, you aren’t doing anything with them. Just hold a phone up to your ear like a normal human being.

If I seem overly irritated at what other people do with their hands, there’s a good reason for this: when Bluetooth users engage in a conversation with someone whilst subconsciously moving their hands in the air for no apparent reason, they look fucking insane.

Allow me to describe the scene:

A man paces up and down a sidewalk, swinging his hands. He goes through a wide range of emotion – arching eyebrows, then a frown, then boisterous laughter, then quizzical confusion. Then, he begins to talk to absolutely no one, moving his hands as he speaks, visually demonstrating concepts and anecdotes to an invisible onlooker.

Now, before the advent of the Bluetooth phone, anyone seeing the above person in public would –rightfully—assume he was some sort of lunatic who was talking to God. That is how you Bluetooth users look to the rest of us. Nothing, apart from a miniscule, easy-to-miss electronic device on one ear, visually separates you from crazy crackheads and/or hobos who regularly defecate themselves whilst engaging in stimulating conversation with Yahweh.

I’ve seen some people attempt to counter this problem by adopting a regular stance whilst talking on their Bluetooths; more often than not, this pose involves – wait for it – putting one of your hands on your ear. Ostensibly, this is to make it easier for random passerby to notice the existence of the Bluetooth, but so long as you’re putting one hand on your ear every time you have a phone conversation, then why not get, you know, a normal goddamned phone? 

Everyone who doesn’t have a Bluetooth thinks they look ridiculous. Everyone. To give you some idea of the true breadth of mankind’s hatred for the Bluetooth, consider the fact that the BBC based an entire series of Doctor Who episodes around enemies who were turned into mindless, killing automatons (known as Cybermen) through use of Bluetooth headsets. To rephrase: one of the biggest television corporations in the world devoted a third of a season of their single most popular series to the idea that Bluetooths would eventually turn the whole of mankind into emotionless murderers. Hell, Doctor Who doesn’t even save the affected humans throughout the show – he just kills them. For the uninitiated, Doctor Who never kills anyone, so his decision to gank human beings just for wearing hands-free phone headsets is kind of a big deal.

In short: you don’t need them, they look stupid, and you distract and confuse the people who have to watch you use them. Even shorter:

STOP WEARING YOUR GODDAMN BLUETOOTH HEADSET.