It's possible that's all you use your phone for at the table, but if you take a step back and observe, is that really all you use it for?
Do you look at that incoming email that isn't from the on-call address? Do you just check for new messages even when nobody is calling? Do you look at your twitter feed? Facebook? Just a quick check onto a favorite web site? Tap out replies to anything except on-call or your wife?
It could be that you're the exception - maybe you do only respond when you hear the special notification sound for your wife or the on-call originating address. I'm dubious - but that's colored by my own experience. I thought much the same of myself until I actually stopped and paid attention to what I was doing with my phone when around others.
When I'm on call all my pages come in over SMS so I'm generally only responding to alert sounds and only doing anything about it if it came from the pager gateway or my wife. Aside from phone and SMS I have all other notification sounds turned off. Unless it's my wife or a page I wouldn't even unlock the phone if I was genuinely spending time with people. The current time is on the lock screen so there's that.
A lot of times though, in a lunch-with-coworkers situation, we just run out of things to talk about and check our phones sometimes and that's okay.
Do you look at that incoming email that isn't from the on-call address? Do you just check for new messages even when nobody is calling? Do you look at your twitter feed? Facebook? Just a quick check onto a favorite web site? Tap out replies to anything except on-call or your wife?
It could be that you're the exception - maybe you do only respond when you hear the special notification sound for your wife or the on-call originating address. I'm dubious - but that's colored by my own experience. I thought much the same of myself until I actually stopped and paid attention to what I was doing with my phone when around others.