A New Use for a Cell Phone

Earlier tonight, I was on the bus (technically, a streetcar - the L-car for those of you keeping score) and I observed these two dudes. They were sitting in the very back end of the streetcar. I think they were French (technically, cheese-eating surrender monkeys for those of you keeping score) because they were speaking what sounded like the French language. (It's possible they were Canadian, I suppose.)

So both of these dudes looked to be in their twenties, they were actually dressed like typical American college students (jeans, t-shirt, hoodie), and they were just chatting with each other. One of them was twiddling his cellphone in his hand. It was a silver RAZR, just like the phone I have.

It seemed like a normal enough scene: two buddies on the bus, around nine o'clock at night, enjoying a peaceful ride to their destination.

Then the dude holding the RAZR started wiping it on his hoodie. I guess he must have gotten some fingerprints or something and smudged the screen, so he probably wanted to clean it a bit. As he was wiping it on his hoodie, I started to think, Wow, he really wants to make that sucker clean. He wiped it for quite some time. I mean, we passed one or two bus stops and he was still wiping it.

After a while, the two guys stopped talking to each other. I looked over at them again and I noticed that the guy with the phone was now using his t-shirt to clean it. Only, the part of his shirt that he was using was the part that happened to fall right above his crotch.

It isn't an unusual location of one's shirt, except that this fella left that part of his shirt lying on his crotch. So it completely looked like he was just scratching himself. Blatant crotch-scratching! He left the phone and the bottom part of the front of his shirt physically all over his crotch area as he "rubbed" the "phone" clean.

It was strange. I know it's not polite to look. And in San Francisco, the fact that I stared (surreptitiously, I will add) could be interpreted as homoerotic (I assure you, that is not the case). I was just fascinated how vigorously the dude rubbed himself. It's not often that you see someone blatantly molest himself in public, and try to disguise his impolite action by pretending to clean his cell phone. In a way, that is sort of a clever use for a phone, although he needs to refine his technique to improve the stealth factor.

When I got off the bus, he was still workin' it. I'm guessing his phone is pretty much spit-shined by now.