We need a new hand gesture, one that says:

“Excuse me, Hipster Guy or Fashionable Miss, will you remove your iPod headphones for a moment? Sorry to interrupt your personal concert, but this building may blow up.”

I discovered this need at 8:30 a.m. Monday when a bomb threat was reported at the Student Learning Center, where I work as a help desk consultant for Enterprise Information Technology Services.

After evacuating the building, I took up a post on the corner of Lumpkin and Baxter streets, where I was supposed to keep students a safe distance away.

I stood next to a uniformed University police officer, and we were surrounded by police trucks with flashing lights.

Hundreds of students, perhaps preoccupied with getting to their 9:05 classes or still groggy from bed, streamed toward us from their dormitories on Baxter Hill.

Our arms outstretched, we began calling out to them that the SLC was closed and that they needed to follow a safe path around the building.

Those that heard us stopped short and then moved on. Those that didn’t hear us – mp3 player headphones tucked snugly in their ears – tried to enter the empty building.

Some of those ear bud wearers almost bumped into us before waking up to the situation. I could understand how they missed me. I was dressed as a student and my name tag wasn’t too obvious.

They looked right past me as I yelled out to them. They were listening to Soulja Boy, or maybe even the new one from Britney.

But the police officer was a big guy with a loud voice. He had a badge. He had a gun.

It didn’t matter. They walked past him, too. I found myself approaching them and acting out the ear bud pull-out motion before I tried to speak to them.

I must have looked like a crazy person, aping them with no headphones in my ears.

Personal devices aren’t improving our lives when they endanger us. Or, in my case, when they turn us into simians gesticulating at passers-by on a street corner.

That was when I realized our new communication need. If we are going to cut ourselves off from social interaction so we can stay inside our entertainment cocoons, we’ll need some form of emergency interrupt.

I propose a hybrid gesture.

It will need to have the intuitiveness of cupping a hand to an ear to tell a speaker to talk louder, but it will need to carry the power and immediacy of the single finger salute.

And it should be easily adaptable for other situations:

“Hey, Miss Cell Talker, you’re about to walk in front of a moving bus.”

Any linguists out there want to take a shot at designing it?

I’m sure Apple will be happy to market it as the next must-have iPod accessory.

- Joe Mason is the online project specialist for The Red & Black and is a consultant for EITS at the SLC.