How did people do that before there were cell phones?
Most times when babysitters are hired, now or a generation ago, they're trusted to make reasonable decisions so the parents don't have to worry.
No one questioned the babysitter's competence. They're your children -- you're going to want to call and check to see how things are going.
The vast majority of the time consumed in that process is simply getting out from where you sit/stand and back, which is the same in the "unjailed" phone scenario.
Unless, of course, you were just going to go ahead and conduct that call right there in the venue anyway.
It all reminds me of DRM causing problems for legitimate, paying customers when the DRM should only be targeting those who go outside of the rules. That's where someone else's comment about treating everyone like adults and kicking people out who break the rules seems like the best bet, although they also admitted (and I agree) that this system just doesn't work as needed, either.
A lot of the time your mates aren't looking at the phone at the right time, or there are so many people that you don't get good reception. Looking up and just finding people works pretty well.
Surely not every time you go to the loo, if it's just the once it's hardly much inconvenience.
Yes. If you suffer from high levels of anxiety and don't trust your own decisions about who to trust, this is true. Many people, particularly Americans, are this way. It is not true for every parent, however.
I used to sit for my nieces and nephews before mobiles were in common usage. My sister would give me the number of the place they were going in case there was a problem.
Of course, this was useless if they had gone to somewhere where there may be more than a couple of dozen people?
So, in reality, people used to hire baby sitters and just trust them to be able to cope. It's not as if you could do much from the other end of a phone if there actually was an emergency?
The main difference is that you tend to plan less up front. When our children were younger, and we had babysitters, we'd point out where the obvious stuff was but if they needed something, they'd just text. You just don't bother with the 15 min tour that I'd have got when I was doing the babysitting.
As a tangential, vaguely amusing, anecdote. A few years ago, my eldest's phone was a bit dodgy and kept cutting out. He was going to meet up with my wife in town but was meeting friends first. The two of them, my wife and son, spent about 5 minutes trying to work out how they could contact each other.
I, genius that I am, proposed a radical solution. I suggested that they arrange to meet at an agreed time and place. It had been such a long time since this was necessary that it hadn't even occurred to my wife (for which I still won't let her forget). My son had never, in his 15 odd years at the time, needed to do this.
Trust the babysitter to make wise choices. This is actully really tough as cell phones end up lowering the standard expected of babysitters, like the whole GPS/map thing.