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Hey, everybody in the coffee shop: do you mind? This is actually my personal office here! A writer asks Dr. Joyce Brothers for advice: "I am a freelance writer who has contracts with several major magazines that publish my work. Since I wasn't getting a whole lot done at home (with all the distractions of the phone and TV), I recently decided to bring a laptop to the local coffee shop to bang out some pages. The results so far have been great, with one exception. Since I told one of the employees there what my job was, he has taken to talking to me incessantly. How do I tell him to back off a bit without hurting his feelings?" Her response, and ours, after the jump.

Dr. Joyce writes, in part, "While it is no doubt irritating to have your train of thought broken by constant interruptions, you must realize that you have chosen to work at a very public, rather than private, place. Unlike at your house, you really can't control who comes into a coffee shop — which usually is a hotspot of local gatherings." [Seattle Pi]

Yes, suck it up. Nick Douglas already warned us about laptoptards. But how sad and kind of pathetic is it that coffeeshops and even bars have been taken over by computers and their zombie-eyed owners? Where are people supposed to go to get laid these days? We all type in cafes sometimes, but it's not very sexy.

We consulted Internet-hater and cultural critic Lee Siegel's new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. Perhaps he has an opinion? He does: "It's not community that the laptopization of the coffeeshop has dispelled. It's the concrete, undeniable, immutable fact of our being in the world."