Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had a taste of the college/university teaching life yesterday.
A cell phone belonging to John Gizzi, a correspondent, rang not once but twice during a press conference, prompting Gibbs to tell him to put it on vibrate, as it had happened before. Then, it rang again, and Gibbs – to the amusement of the press – asked for the phone and tossed it into a different room. “Somebody caught it, don’t worry,” he told Gizzi.
Of course, in some universal law, there was also another phone that rang, and the reporter left the room for the call. Gibbs said, “I assume it’s your banker, with a suit like that.” (It was actually his editor.)
Luckily for Gizzi, Gibbs is not a literature professor I once had, who said that any ringing of cell phones would result in an experiment in “the destruction of a small electronic device.”
