speaker phones

Today is the anniversary of the first phone call. There are now some 531 million telephone numbers in the U.S. You got your pagers, your cellphones, your land lines, your FAXes, your beepers, your Palm Pilots. And you got your speaker phones.
Today I spent half an hour on the phone to England. I was holding my phone to my ear, and She was wandering around the room listening to my stupid questions broadcast at volume. Maybe even smoking a cigarette (though, since She's a geneticist, I doubt it) while I held the phone clutched to my shoulder in the way that invariably gives me an ache and tried to scribble down what she was saying in my notebook. The combo of speaker phone and pommy accent with a liberal spritz of scientific jargon didn't help. In fact, I don't dare look at my notes, because they are full of tridots. . .
We know who had the power position in this call, right?
Reason I can't stop today: Mr. Bell