A person with some education does not interrupt another on the telephone; but he interrupts, without fearing for an instant, one who is thinking, as soon as he has the slightest and most insignificant communicative impulse. From this one can only conclude that thinking is a disease, and that normal people are not used to it; otherwise they would certainly know that a “excuse me” or an “I beg your pardon” in no way lessens the violent and abrupt cut they operate in the flow of ideas, which may never return. Neither morals nor conventions have taken care of this incomparable inconvenience: there are no restraints of any kind on the person who feels the desire to approach a stranger; quite the contrary, it is the stranger who will seem rude if he does not pay attention to the one who demands it. And, finally, how much satisfaction it gave to see for the first time that Karl Kraus noticed it! It is a subject for a whole book, and yet everyone seems accustomed to hearing news when they go to the barbershop; to being approached insistently by anyone who comes forward with the intention of selling. Well done, well done!