Who decides what is normal?

I came across a tweet in my timeline of someone who thought that “calling with a phone in front of your mouth (instead of holding it to your ear) with the speaker on should be forbidden.” I don’t really understand why people use their phone like this either, but this person was clearly frustrated about having to ‘enjoy’ listening to other people’s conversations. When I asked him what particularly annoyed him (is it the sound of a speaker, what people say, how they say it?), he said he preferred hearing “normal voices” at a “normal speaking volume!”

Unfortunate he didn’t answer my questions about what exactly he considers “normal”, and if he is also annoyed if he hears two people talk loudly face to face, but his tweet got me thinking two things. First, what is normal behavior? And second, who decides that norm? Is normal behavior what most people do? And is the norm determined by what most people will tolerate?

As I write this I’m sitting in an “Asian squat”, on top of a chair. Most people probably don’t sit at their dinner table like this, but to me it’s a comfortable position. With my skinny butt, I don’t have much “sitting flesh”, so sometimes I prefer changing to a squat. I don’t sit like this all the time and only at home – I wouldn’t squat in a restaurant or at the office. Physically that would be comfortable, but socially it would be very uncomfortable. Perhaps that is what defines “normal” behavior: it’s what most people feel comfortable doing in public, without getting embarrassed.

Some people don’t feel embarrassed making loud calls. And some people don’t feel embarrassed to do something about it. Like the woman in this amusing story, who turned an annoyance into a prank. But she is probably a rare case. Most of us just try to ignore it, because we are not comfortable saying something about it.

Unless we can do it on Twitter. Minding our own business and then later expressing our frustration online to complete strangers: completely normal.