I thought the noise was unbearable in that moment in time when beepers ruled the land, 20-some years ago.

They would go off in a press conference, and everyone but the perpetrator would be looking around, staring daggers at the idiot who had forgotten to turn off his beeper, which was now squawking.

Now, of course, it is worse. That’s progress for you.

But we have a story here of someone who was truly and deeply humiliated to be the source of the noise pollution, and I appreciate that.

When a cell phone began ringing during a delicate passage of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, as performed by the New York Philharmonic, the conductor took the unusual step of … stopping and turning around to find the guilty party.

He had the entire orchestra stop making music. As the phone’s “marimba ring” rattled on.

The New York Times has the whole story, and it’s fascinating. For a couple of reasons.

For every nine unapologetic cell/iPhone abusers, about one is actually embarrassed. And this was one of them. Spectacularly so.

The man, identified by NYT as “Patron X” is in his 60s and was sitting in the front row, and he was mortified. “You can imagine how devastating it is to know you had a hand in that,” he told the newspaper. “It’s horrible, horrible.”

His phone gaffe was one of the worst imaginable — in a refined and upscale environment — but at least he was contrite, and in the end, it seems as if Old Guy Incompetence was the key factor in the phone going off. It was a new gadget for the man, who apparently wasn’t clear how it worked, and it seems the alarm went off — when he didn’t know how to set it. So even though he had switched the phone to “silent” for phone calls, the alarm went off unchecked. And of all the ways to meet your maker, “torn to pieces by Mahler fans” or “bludgeoned to death by percussionists” have to be among the most unlikely.

At least Patron X had the good taste to be embarrassed. Anyone who has been inside a movie theater in the past 10 years knows that at least half a dozen patrons are going to take calls in the middle of the picture.

Over here in the UAE, these conditions are at least as pervasive as in the U.S., and perhaps worse.

Movie-goers here not only will talk to their neighbors during a movie, they will not turn off their Blackberries and iPhones — which means phone calls that they will accept, but also constant messaging, during the movies. How do we know? Because of all the people bent over their screens, the puddles of light from their “smart” phones illuminating their clueless faces.

And those are unrepentant abusers of public spaces.

I was in a newsroom meeting with the editor in chief the other day, and at least three people in the room got phone calls during the one-hour meeting. At least they didn’t take the calls.

It’s an epidemic. It probably never will get better. Only worse. One of those going-to-hell-in-a-hand-basket things that we old guys notice. And once in a while, we’re the perpetrators, but at least it comes with chagrin, if not horror.