Hi friends,
Just this morning I had a strange experience which may indicate that there is such a thing as “too many devices”! Crazy as that sounds.
While in the wee wee room just after getting up, I hear a computer voice call out for Barry Moe, pretty loud, somewhere in the apartment. Never heard it before, no idea which it was or why. Spooky.
I would go nuts if I didn’t generally turn of most Notifications, and even totally silence some of my devices. But things change, and sometimes there’s a new Ghost.
Even when I had searched around and now had limited it to one side of my bedroom, that was limited help, because on my bedstand I discover that I have no less than *six* speakers or devices with speakers! (If we count single speakers, it’s ten of them.) (An iPhone, a landline phone, an iPod Classic in a speaker hub, a bluetooth speaker, Soundsticks II speakers, a Kindle HDX. I try regularly to cut it back to a minimum, I do!)
It turned out it was the silly bluetooth speaker (well, it’s otherwise quite good). And it wanted me to know that it had a “battery low” situation. Not Barry Moe, but “battery low” in a poor computer voice. Couldn’t somebody at least have recorded this so it was intelligible?
And what if it starts doing that in the middle of the night, and you have a job interview or test in the morning?
---
My friend B added some perspective:
… a while back, I read a long article recounting the acclimatization of a Westerner settling in Japan. There was a whole section about all of the noises produced by everything over there, showing how the Japanese love their "smart" gadgets.
There was this one sound in particular that would eruct at the oddest times, and at any hour of the day or night, but he could never figure out what it was or where it came from. In the end, as a desperate measure to fend off the insanity slowly settling in I suppose, the guy had to resort to asking the landlord to help him find this tormenting ghost. Turned out to be the bathtub signaling it's readiness to serve and please its master... no sh*t.
Me, I would go insane -- I mean violent insane, far worse than my usual state, that is. I get pissed when the microwave loudly beeps four times when it's done because one beep at 1/10th the volume would largely suffice. Heck, just the thing going silent is enough to say it's done, wait at least 10 seconds before annoying the world!! I just don't get people who love such aggressions.
But the worst part is that, things being what they are, I have built internal filters (just like everyone else) to disregard the ruckus. Which makes the @#$%^!! bell necessary, because I don't notice the effing thing going quiet any more. And, lately, it seems that I'm starting to not notice the effing beeper either... making the beeper even more redundant or, God preserve us, making it insufficient?
-- B
Warm regards, Eolake
