Cell-Phone Zapper

I am not a wuss. And yet I've never told people to pipe down when they were disturbing my peace with their too-loud blatherings on a cell phone. I let them disrupt my naps on the morning train. I even turn the other cheek in restaurants or at the movie theater. Instead, I quietly simmer, indulging violent fantasies that involve the loud-mouthed caller's being stranded in a swamp with nothing but his cell phone and a starving, 1,200-lb. alligator named Big 'un.

Recently, though, I came into possession of what may be the ultimate weapon for people like me who hate cell-phone abusers: the C-Guard "cellular firewall," a $900 device that jams cellular calls. My pal Roger Rodriguez, a gentle soul who works in TIME magazine's tech department, actually ordered one. "I wanted to try it out," he explained. He had a look in his eye that I recognized.

Rodriguez lent me the thing, which is roughly the size of a paperback novel. It has a short, ugly black antenna that screws on. For power, you can plug it into the wall or use a battery pack. It's simple to operate: you flip a switch, and the appliance does its thing, obliterating cellular transmissions in an area comparable to a medium-size movie theater. That's in cities; out in the country, where the distance between cells is greater, the device can take out one whole floor of a building.

As I started to fool around with this marvel--it worked like a charm in my office!--my fantasies began to change. I decided that my first real test would be on the train. Why just the other day, over the course of a fitful hour, my sleep was disrupted by three different phones ringing to the tunes of La Cucaracha, Fur Elise and the Ride of the Valkyries. With the C-Guard secreted in my briefcase, I would lie in wait for some Valkyrie-riding nitwit to make my day. Just as my unsuspecting victim's phone trilled, say, the Mexican Hat Dance, I'd jam down the button. "Hello?" he'd bleat pathetically. "Hello? Hello? Hello?"

Then, like subway vigilante Bernie Goetz, I'd calmly get up and stroll over to him, mumbling, "You don't look so bad," and hit the button a few more times. The other passengers on the now weirdly quiet train would turn to one another and ask, "Who was that guy?"

"The cell-phone vigilante," I'd hiss over my shoulder. And return to my nap.

There was only one problem. Netline Communications, the Israeli company that makes the C-Guard, neglected to include a battery pack. So I called Gil Israeli (that's his name, not a typo), the CEO who co-founded the company, and explained my predicament. He was not amused. In fact, he refused to send me a battery pack. "These devices are intended for indoor, private use," he said, noting that theater and restaurant owners fell into this category. "We don't claim they should be used outside, in public, to interfere with legitimate people using cell phones." So you don't have plans to make a smaller, personal-use cell-phone zapper? I asked him. No, he said. Oh, well.

Next week: How to buy an alligator.

For more about Netline's cell-phone jammer, try www.cguard.com . Questions for Josh? E-mail him at jquit@well.com