Anna Turner- Cellphone etiquette | Canterbury Opinion | Local Voices from Canterbury, New Zealand

How often has this happened to you?

You're out to dinner with friends and start pouring your heart out about the horrible day you had at work. You look up, expecting to be greeted by sympathetic looks and a rousing speech telling you to hang in there.

Instead your friends are staring down at their phones, engrossed in something else.

"Sorry, what were you saying?" one of them asks.

It's so frustrating you want to take the cellphone, rub it in their butter chicken, and shove it right down their throat.

Okay, maybe I wouldn't take it that far - they are your friends after all - but it is annoying.

I know that most of us are guilty of sending a sly text during dinner or taking a call that probably could have waited.

But if you really think about it, you're actually insulting the people you're with.

I have a friend who is always checking his phone during dinner - not just to text, but to tweet, Facebook and goodness knows what else.

I always get the impression he doesn't really care who's sitting next to him - he's more interested in talking to whoever he's texting and what people are thinking of his latest status update.

Whenever I've been out to dinner with him, I leave feeling my conversation was clearly not riveting enough to keep him entertained.

The ironic thing - whenever I post something on the online world, he replies instantly. Now that I think about it, he's probably replying while having dinner with someone else...

Well, I've heard of a new game that attempts to solve that problem - it's called the phone stack.

It goes like this:

When you're out somewhere with friends everyone places their phone in a stack on the middle of the table. No one is allowed to touch their phones for the rest of the evening - even if it buzzes or rings. No checking texts, no looking on Twitter, no answering phone calls.

If anyone picks up their phone they lose, and have to pay the bill for the entire table's dinner.

The idea is that it will force people to pay more attention to the company they're with than to the online world.

I know, I know, it sounds a bit like something your grandfather might make you do at a family dinner because you're not listening to him talking about how he found an old war medal at a garage sale back in 1956.

But it was actually made up by some guy in the United States who got really annoyed with his friends being on their phones during meals.

And it turns out he wasn't just a boring guy to have dinner with - the idea has taken off globally. It seems people everywhere are genuinely sick of rude phone etiquette.

I'm going out for dinner with friends later in the week, and I'm going to suggest we try out the phone stack. I'll see if we have an improved evening and if anyone breaks.

Maybe we'll go somewhere cheap just in case. 

* Are you sick of poor phone etiquette? Do you use your phone during dinner? Comment below or email Anna Turner.