The ring that stopped the show

Generally I don't have sympathy for those whose cell phones ring out in the wrong places -- during a movie, say. But I feel for the fellow whose phone went off during Tuesday's concert by the New York Philharmonic. According to Daniel J. Wakin's account in the New York Times:

The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance.

Gilbert felt obliged to stop the music because the ring kept going for some time. Why didn't the offending phone's owner, referred to in the article as "Patron X", kill the noise immediately?

Patron X said he had no idea he was the culprit. He said his company replaced his BlackBerry with an iPhone the day before the concert. He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would sound even if the phone was in silent mode.

“I didn’t even know phones came with alarms,” the man said.

(Patron X's best guess is that he set an alarm earlier in the day without realizing it.)

I believe him. It's easy to imagine being the poor schmuck granted a brand-new gadget and having to use it before being fully conversant with its behavior. In his case, he seems to have been laboring under the understandable misconception that merely locking the screen turns the iPhone "off". (For future reference, the easiest way to silence your iPhone is to use the "vibrate" button and to keep it out of contact with resonant surfaces like hard tabletops.)

I would have been ticked off if I had been in the audience. I wasn't, though, so I'm free to extend some long-distance sympathy to you, Patron X.

[UPDATE: my "for future reference" advice was totally off-base, and the issue is more complicated than I thought. See my follow-up post for the details.]