What a crazy morning, how about you?

Note to hipster ahead of me in line at the Starbucks by the Courthouse on Flagler this morning -- you do not look "cool" in your ironic fedora, particularly when you are ordering a mocha frappachino. Man up, dude.

Anyways, what do you all think of Blackberry addicts who are busy screwing around on their smartphones at depositions, meetings, and even in the courthouse?

Are you being rude or merely multi-tasking when you are playing breakout on your phone during a boring deposition:

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com.

But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

In Hollywood, both the Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency ban BlackBerry use at meetings. Tom Golisano, a billionaire and power broker in New York State politics, said last week that he pushed to remove Malcolm A. Smith as the State Senate majority leader after the senator met with him on budget matters in April and spent the time reading e-mail on his BlackBerry.

The phone use has become routine in the corporate and political worlds — and grating to many. A third of more than 5,300 workers polled in May by Yahoo HotJobs, a career research and job listings Web site, said they frequently checked e-mail in meetings. Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices.

Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors.

A few years ago, only “the investment banker types” would use BlackBerrys in meetings, said Frank Kneller, the chief executive of a company in Elk Grove Village, Ill., that makes water-treatment systems. “Now it’s everybody.” He said that if he spotted 6 of 10 colleagues tapping away, he knew he had to speed up his presentation.

Personally I think some latitude should be shown to lawyers who use their smartphones to stay in touch with the office and respond to emails from opposing counsel and so forth. The device is one of the reasons the lawyer is able to be out of the office in the first place.

But in court it's a definite no-no -- you should really leave and go outside to tap away, and in face-to-face meetings I think maybe once or twice during a lunch might be ok but checking every five minutes makes you look like a fidgety schmuck.

We've discussed before the social disconnect that many of us have with everyone else in our lives due to the constant, incessant demands of technology.

Here's a nice summation I came across today:

We are having distracted bits and pieces of conversation via text to people who aren't with us, which of course makes us have distracted bits and pieces of conversation with the people who are. We all go about our lives now with one foot in the invisible realm of our e-social lives. Admit it, if you're out with a friend and they get up to go to the bathroom, the first thing you do is reach instinctively for your PDA/phone, when you used to just sit idly and people-watch. Because even when it's quiet, it never stops whispering at you from your pocket or your purse: "cheeeeck meeeee. I could be that person who blew you off, finally coming to my senses. I could be that work email you've been waiting for. I could be that invitation to something better than where you are now." It whispers, it calls to us, it is both our social wellspring and the black hole devouring The Now.

I thought a brilliant film exploring this very disconnect was Ridley Scott's overlooked A Good Year, where during the course of the film Russell Crowe learns how to disengage, drop the Treo, and not coincidentally fall in love both with the gorgeous Provence countryside and a captivating local French waitress.

In Jeremy Rifkin's The Age of Access, the Wharton scholar warned us nearly a decade ago:

... while we have created every kind of labor- and time-saving device and activity to service one another's needs and desires in the commercial sphere, we are beginning to feel like we have less time available to us than any other humans in history.

... The network-based economy does indeed increase the speed of connections, shorten durations, improve efficiency, and make life more convenient by turning everything imaginable into a service. But when most relationships become commercial relationships and every individual's life is commodified twenty-four hours a day, what is left for relationships of a noncommercial nature -- relationships based on kinship, neighborliness, shared cultural interests, religious affiliation, ethnic identification, and fraternal and civic involvement?

Who the hail cares -- see you all on Twitter!