Phone to Fridge: shut up!

When one of us (Roberson) used to live in Wheaton, Ill., his car's FM radio would blare static every time he drove near a pole-mounted electrical transformer. Now, when he's near a particular intersection in Chicago and an elevated train passes by, his mobile phone call gets dropped. The same thing happened to him in a rapid transit station in Washington, D.C., during a conference call with the other two authors of this article. One of them (Matheson) has had to train himself to wait until the commercials begin before turning on his electric toothbrush, because it always breaks up the picture and sound of the TV set in his bedroom.