Brace yourself. I have some terrible news. You may want to be seated, perhaps even sedated. Here it is. The headline from Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle:

“Café asks customers to turn off laptops and start talking.”

WTF?!? The nanny state is going private? If I want to go to a café and sing Adam Lambert love songs, I will. If I want to put in some ear buds in and cut myself off from the rest of the world, I will. If I want to ask the stranger next to me where he got that handsome pocket square, I will. But I do not want to be told to do it!

Is it already not bad enough that we have to wear seatbelts, smoke twenty feet away from small children, and read how much sodium is in our Big Mac’s? My god, whatever happened to personal irresponsibility?

According to the article, the owner of a café in Oakland asks patrons who flip open their laptops to “unplug, sign off and log out. They’ll be encouraged to sit at communal tables and chat.”

Communal tables? What is this, Romania, 1973? Basically, I don’t like strangers. I don’t want to talk to them. In fact, in my coffee shop, I nurse grudges against people who I’ve never met for the pettiest of offenses. Every morning one older man brings in a plastic container filled with the most pungent guacamole you’ve ever smelled. He spoons it straight into his disgusting maw. At eight in the morning I don’t want to be assaulted by the odor of garlic and onions and avocado. But do I ask him not to eat it? No. I do the proper thing in a democracy: I hate him. Quietly. Unobtrustively. Without trampling on his right to annoy me.

Now here’s the part of the story that is perhaps the most horrifying:

“Customers, when pried away from their computer screens Friday afternoon, said they were thrilled at the idea. ‘When I get away from the computer, it’s a relief,’ said Genevieve Walker, a graphic designer who spends two or three hours in cafes tapping away on her laptop.”

Thrilled? Really? You have so little sense of yourself, of what you want, of who you are, that you need to be told to turn off your computer? Jesus, it’s like a two year old who needs to have a juice box pried from his sticky little fingers.

Want to encourage people to chat at your café? Do what mine does. Be passive-aggressive about. Don’t badger them. Don’t harass them. Just supply no outlets. Batteries can only last so long. After that, people can leave in a huff (as I do), or they can rub their bloodshot eyes, look around at their fellow earthlings, and chat all they want.

But I do not want to be tapped on the shoulder and told I should be chatting up a stranger rather than watching upskirt videos of professional ice skaters, dammitt! It’s not right, and it’s not American!