I hear the world beeping. Beep, says my cellphone when it gets a message.
Beep, says my microwave oven when my pasta is warmed up.
Sometimes I long for a natural sound: a bird singing, a dog barking, children laughing, anything to drown out the maddening beeps that have become the soundtrack to modern life. My cellphone? It isn't enough that its ring tone offerings seem to stretch from "annoying" to "extremely annoying".
It also has to beep whenever someone texts me.
The microwave? A bell rings when it's finished heating my food. But is that enough? No. If I don't rush to it right away, it starts beeping, like an impatient child tugging at my sleeve.
I know there's food in the microwave. I'm the one who put it there.
The regular oven, perhaps because it's jealous of the microwave oven chooses to beep whenever a preset temperature is reached.
"Hey!" the beep seems to say.
"Don't forget you want to shove a pie in my kisser!"Every single hair-curling, -crimping and -straightening tool employed by the women in my household beeps.
Getting ready to go out sounds like the checkout lane at the supermarket. The smoke detector is the worst offender. When its batteries are in need of replacement, it emits a series of chirps. Short and sharp, they are the last gasps of a scared and dying man.
A parrot-owning friend of mine returned home to find his African Grey mimicking that very sound. The things that don't beep, buzz. And if, for some reason, beeping and buzzing is beneath them, they clear their throats and perform a symphony.
Whenever I turn on my 40-inch, 1080p, high-definition television with three HDMI inputs and a 30,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio it performs an aria. Same thing when I turn it off. I think I'd pay more for a TV not so full of itself. The sad thing is, someone wrote that little ditty.
Some composer had to obsess about precisely which two-second blast of music would best signify that a flat-screen TV was on.
And once he created his greatest work he probably waited for the oven to beep so he could stick his head in it. But at least I know where each of these sounds is coming from. That isn't always the case.
For weeks, My Lovely Wife and I were awoken in the small hours of the night by a beeping. There, in the sepulchral stillness, we ran through the inventory of possible suspects.
Could we have a text message? (At 3am? Possible, but no.) Could the oven and the microwave be trying to communicate? (No, the sound was different.) Could it be any of the other wondrous devices able to make a sound? Curling iron, crockpot, rice cooker, smoke detector, carbon monoxide detector, TV set, clock radio, shower radio . . .
The only way to tell was to chase the sound down, but no sooner would we pull on our bathrobes than the beeping would stop. We didn't hear it every night but often enough that we would climb into bed wondering whether our slumber would be interrupted by that maddening sound.
The beeps were steady but infrequent - about 10 seconds apart.
We became adept at rocketing out of REM sleep at the first beep, all the better to track it to its lair. We would get close to it, beg it to beep once more so we could be certain of its location, only to strain our ears in vain as it silenced itself.
Finally, early one morning, when the birds were singing their wondrous songs, my wife found it: in the study, under a desk, a big plastic cube that was plugged into the wall.
It was a battery back-up that we'd inherited from my wife's mother. We'd never known it was capable of speech.
I think it just wanted someone to talk to. - John Kelly.
