The scene: You walk into a small coffee shop with 20 people at the tables. Several obvious couples. The only noise you hear is the steam from the coffemaker. Nobody is speaking, they are texting. It's obvious that many of the couples are texting each other.

Even discounting my role as old curmudgeon, this is a scary sight to me. What happened to social intercourse? The gadget generation has grown up with digital stimulation, fueled by caffeine. I watched a young man at a restaurant who spent much of meal staring at his phone, grabbing lizard like bites from his plate between messages. Even when his mother showed up to meet him, he talked to her but never made eye contact.

I guess this phenomenon is so wide spread, some teens broadcast their lives in real time. The term "CrackBerry" best defines the advanced stages of this disease among young professionals. People feel compelled to share the most mundane and trivial aspects of their lives. (I don't care if the line at WalMart is too slow for you)  Young people are bound by their text circle, afraid to venture out in the world without the validation of their buddies. Breaking free of your group must be very difficult, how do you get rid of phone spam? What ever happened to being alone with your thoughts? You see folks sitting on the can reading their CrackBerry. Despite almost perpetual communication, it seems many young people are more disconnected than ever.

I don't have any solutions. But I do have a new product. Fake Bluetooth headsets for the mentally challenged. Think about it. How many people walk around with their earpieces blabbering nonsense. When you respond (because you thought they were talking to you) they get angry. Why not empty the mental wards, give them all fake Bluetooths? They would fit right in with the connected generation -- muttering crazy talk to no one.