Phone Sounds

I really don't understand why TV shows insist on having cell phone sounds on when that's not how most of these characters would operate in real life.

Sure, I get that there are some instances where you would want the phone to ring when you're in a public place or at work. Like on cop shows where you're interviewing someone and you want them to know you're taking a call and receiving a piece of information. Fine, that makes sense. Or if you're at home. That makes sense too. But in a restaurant? In an office meeting? Yes, in real life, people do forget to turn their phone sounds off sometimes, but our social norms are for phones to be on vibrate or silent.

In one of the episodes of Elementary that we watched tonight (episode 2.21, "The Man With the Twisted Lip"), Joan is at a restaurant and attempts to surreptitiously take a photo of men that are conducting suspicious activities at the restaurant. She finishes her conversation, turns her phone camera towards them, and then, click! You hear the click of the phone camera taking the picture. Why, why, why would you do that? If she's trying to be secretive, then she would never have the sound on. If it were on before that while she was at the restaurant (which I doubt, since she seems like the type to follow phone etiquette), then surely she would check it before taking a secret photo, right? I could not suspend disbelief at that moment. I think I even remarked aloud about how dumb it was.

Sure enough, by the end of the episode (I know the episode aired 3 weeks ago so I shouldn't need to, but I'll SPOILER ALERT anyway), Joan gets kidnapped. She looks at a photo of herself in an envelope, and the guy who assaults her remarks that she took a photo of him so he has one of her. Well, maybe she shouldn't have been so obvious so he could hear her taking the picture. I'm sure there must have been some other way to get this plot point to happen without the camera sound.

It's not a huge deal, but these things just bug me. So many people these days have smartphones, so it isn't hard to write the technology (and what characters would do with it) correctly. It doesn't take much more effort. In this week's episode of Awkward (which I'm still watching even if the quality and the laughs have dropped dramatically since its creator left at the end of last season), Tamara's phone vibrated when she got her text messages at a sorority party. Viewers can figure out what's going on without phone sounds.

It's not just this show though. You see these weird technology quirks everywhere on TV. Like when Castle tried to pretend you needed a passcode to dial 911 on an iPhone. That one still annoys me, since the hunt for a passcode took up a significant part of the episode. That's an even worse technology foul than the camera sound too. Is it that hard to be realistic?