It's actually the story of the next century, and it was carried on the wire services the other day from Israel.

An Israeli man, the story reported, "was pulled over Monday after a policewoman nabbed him driving through the coastal town of Netanya with a mobile phone in each hand. Engrossed in his conversations, he was operating the steering wheel with his elbows," the car meandering from side to side.

It is the anxiety that is going to be produced when telecommunications combines with the "Evernet" -- the technology that will soon allow people to get on line from their watches, their cars, their toasters or their Walkmans -- so that everyone will be able to be connected all the time, everywhere.

This virus of overconnectedness is spreading daily, and it has no known cure. Recently at a restaurant, my daughter and I found ourselves seated between two families, both of whose fathers were speaking loudly into cell phones, as if they were in their offices. I wanted to scream: "Look, I'm on vacation. I'm trying to get away from my office. I don't want to be in your office. Turn off that phone!"

More and more I find myself reacting to people with cell phones the same way I react to people smoking cigars at the dinner table next to me -- violently. I call it Y2K rage.

I can't wait for the day when they have soundproof, glass-enclosed cell-phone sections in restaurants. "Cell phone or no cell phone?" the maitre d' will ask. I also can't wait for the day that someone comes out with a device that enables you to jam all the cell phones around you as easily as opening your garage door. Zap -- no more dial tone. So sorry.

It is not surprising that overconnectedness is the disease of the Internet age. Because as the Internet and globalization shrink both time and distance, it's great for business, but it's becoming socially claustrophobic. The New Yorker carried a cartoon a few weeks ago of a man escorting his date back to her apartment door after dinner. She squeezes his hands and says, "I'd love to ask you in, Howard, but they start trading in Hong Kong in ten minutes."

Time and distance provide buffers and breathing space in our lives, and when you eliminate both you eliminate some very important cushions.

Before cell phones and beepers, a friend says that when someone called his Madison Avenue office and he was out, his secretary would simply say, "Alan is out."

Now the caller demands to be connected to Alan's cell phone, or that the secretary beep him. The presumption now is that he's always reachable -- that he's never out.

Out is over. Now, you're always in. And when you're always in, you're always on. And when you're always on, you're just like a computer server. You can never stop and relax.

When was the last time you heard someone say, "Well, let me sleep on that?" Good luck. A Wall Street exec says he used to love going to Japan, working all day and then hitting the great Tokyo restaurants at night.

But now he works all day, and just when he's about to go to bed in Tokyo, the faxes, beeper messages and cell phone calls start coming in from New York. "I haven't been out to dinner in Tokyo in five years," he says. "I end up working a 19-hour day now" -- the full Tokyo day and the full New York day.

What happens when we're always connected is that the boundary between work and play disappears. Yes, working moms and dads can now be home more. That's good. But what it often means is that the workday just becomes 19 hours.

I have a friend in a high-stress government legal job. He told me he often came home early, and on weekends, with his cell phone and tried to work at home to be with his teen-age daughter. Even though it meant that 20 minutes out of every two hours he was on his cell phone, he figured it was better than nothing. His daughter disagreed. She eventually got so upset with all the interruptions that she finally said to him, "Dad, just stay at the office."

I'm with her. There's no such thing as "quality time" with your kids. There's only quantity time, and that's what overconnectedness threatens to destroy -- if we let it. So please, don't call me. I'll call you -- at the office.