Ringtone Rules

Having worked in the ringtone industry for nearly three years, I have a couple of tips to share with those of you who choose to download ringtones to your phones. Violation of any of these rules will immediately brand you as a huge duesche bag and anyone around will instantly lose any respect they had for you.

1. Once you pick up your phone, you must either silence the ringer or answer the call immediately. Letting your ringtone play while staring at the caller ID as if you are unsure what to do is not an option. If you really want to show off your hot new tone, you need to find more friends to call you, not sit there and embarass yourself staring at your mobile while it rings away.

2. No dancing. No singing. Under no circumstances may you perform some sort of dance, hand motion, wave, body jiggle, sing along, hum, etc to your own ringtone. This is a major violation. You bought this tone to show people how cool you are, not how lame you are. Don't even consider it. Even if you are wasted.

3. You may not browse your ringtones within earshot of another person, unless they specifically ask, in which case you should hand the phone to them and let them browse your tones. If there is a long lull in the conversation and all you can think of is to browse obnoxious, canny sounding 15 second music clips on your cell phone, you better order another round and loosen up.

4. Never, ever refer to a ringtone as a "ringtune". In this age of inventing cool new slang for every damn pop culture phenomenon, the best thing you can do to help overcome this butchery of the english language is to abstain.

5. If you are going to stick with top-40 radio hits, please please change them once the song is no longer popular. Seriously, download a couple classic songs to use as backups for when your hit-of-the-moment song is long faded and overplayed. Noone wants to hear that song anymore, much less blaring out of a cell phone speaker. Those of you STILL using "Milkshake" by Kelis, that means you.

There you have it. If you abide by these simple rules, you will tread safely along the fine line of using cool ringtones. Remember, its very easy to turn a cool phone into an obnoxious piece of junk with the wrong ringtone.