Madan Mishra, senior HR executive at a multinational, remembers a recent job interview. The bubbly young lady was answering all his questions with quiet confidence. Suddenly, her cellphone —tucked deep in her handbag — began to ring.

Mishra was visibly annoyed. The least you can do at a job interview is to put your phone on mute. Annoyance was overtaken by astonishment. Instead of apologising and switching off her mobile, the PYT fished it out and had a one-minute conversation. Needless to say, she didn’t get the job.

The curious part, says Mishra, is that she didn’t realise that she had done anything wrong. “Cellphones have become so much a part of our lives that you don’t realise how irritating they can be to others,” says he. “I would put it on a par with digging your nose in public or scratching the more private parts of your anatomy.”

In India, where people are less polite than in most other countries, cellphones have risen from the level of a nuisance to a positive menace. On busy streets, drivers can be found blabbing on mobiles. In buses, you will find half-a-dozen loudmouths screaming their business.

Perhaps they think it gives them status. Newbies to the mobile world feel they must announce it to everybody. They are not very different from the senior journalist at the Delhi Press Club in the early days of mobile phones when calls used to cost Rs 16 a minute. He used to sit at a central table and talk loudly into the phone about what he had told the Prime Minister or some similar ‘panjandrum’. Then, one day, while he was in full flow, his phone rang. People around him realised that the whole thing had been for their benefit; there was no one at the other end of the line when he was waxing eloquent about his proximity to the PM.

Misuse of cellphones is particularly rampant in the corporate world. A recent survey finds it the third most important irritant during meetings (see box). It starts at the top. The CEO — or whoever is conducting the meeting — has to keep his cellphone prominently on the table in front of him. That’s a measure of his importance. So everybody who likes to think of himself as up-and-coming does the same. A meeting soon becomes a cacophony of ringtones.

Thankfully, though quite accidentally, some sanity is returning. Today, the boss doesn’t carry a cellphone; his secretary does. If you are still answering your own cellphone, you won’t be making it to the corner office any time soon.

There is a lot of literature available on cellphone etiquette. Career planning professional Dawn Rosenberg McKay has the following tips for the workplace:

• Turn your cellphone ringer off.

• Use your cellphone only for important calls. Pre-decide what you consider important.

• Let your cellphone calls go to voice mail. It takes much less time to check your messages than to answer the call and tell the caller you can’t talk.

• Find a private place to make personal cellphone calls. Your co-workers have a job to do.

• Don’t bring your cellphone to meetings. Even if you have your cellphone set to vibrate, if you receive a call you will be tempted to see who it’s from. This is not only rude, it is a clear signal to your boss that your mind isn’t 100 per cent on your job.

• Don’t ever take your cellphone into the restroom. It is an invasion of your co-workers’ privacy.

Besides, if you have ever tried answering nature’s call and a phone call at the same time, you will realise that it cannot be done with any degree of comfort or hygiene.

OUCH POINT

What people find most irritating during meetings (%)

• Disorganised, rambling meetings 27

• People who interrupt peers and try to dominate the meeting 17

• Cellphone interruptions 16

• People who fall asleep in meetings 9

• Meetings with no bathroom breaks 8

• Long meetings without refreshments 6

• People leaving early or arriving late 5

• People who check their BlackBerries during meetings 5

• Meetings starting late 4

• No written recap of the meeting outcomes 4

Source: Survey in the US by Opinion Research