Mother Theresa
| Things That Go Beep in the Night |
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| Written by Mother Theresa | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sunday, 06 April 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I was sleeping, which is in no way the same as being asleep. It sounds the same? No, it’s not. Is f***ing the same as being f***ed? Didn’t think so. Sleeping is an active thing, a thing to be enjoyed and taken seriously, while being asleep is something anybody can do. Anyway, I’m a night owl and I usually go to bed late. But once I do, I take my sleeping seriously. And I get really pissed off when someone or something wakes me up. Last night my cell phone committed a heinous act by alerting me of its low battery level. Okay, it didn’t actually say “I said BEEP, dammit!”, but it might as well have. Shaken out of our pleasant dreams by the phone’s ear-splitting complaint, my husband and I both sat up, very nearly knocking our heads together. We both stumbled around the dark room, colliding with the furniture, trying to locate the damn thing so we could put it out of its misery. By the time we found it, under a pile of papers on the desk, I was completely awake. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, nor will it be the last, I’m sure. I usually turn it off at night. Really, I swear. My husband doesn’t believe me, but it’s true. But I'm human and sometimes I forget. And when I do, the battery will inevitably be low. There must be a version of Murphy’s Law for cell phones. If you forget to turn off the phone at night, the low battery alarm will go off somewhere between 2 and 4 AM. It doesn’t matter if the battery has just been charged or not, trust me, the alarm will still go off. And the worst bit, there is no way to turn the f***ing alarm off. Absolutely none. It’s not like my phone is some cheap basic model. No, this baby has all kinds of neat features. It plays music, takes pictures, can connect to internet, and even has a large collection of games. I can choose any ring tone I want. It tells me when peoples’ birthdays are and keeps track of my appointments. Hell, it even tells me when I need to stock up on Tampax because it knows even the most intimate secrets of my life. But can I turn the Low Battery Alarm off? Noooo. Can I lower the volume of said alarm? Noooo. So, last night, after being torn away from my very serious task of sleeping, I lay awake, cursing the guy who developed my cell phone. Is an on/off function for the battery alarm really too much to ask for? Or at the very least a nice soft cricket-like sound that blends nicely into the night. Or even an owl. Hey, I could make my peace with an owl.
I think it’s something else entirely. It must be a sadistic streak intrinsic to phone designers everywhere. They must sit up late designing fabulous new phone models, and secretly taking pleasure in choosing the most annoying sound available for the low battery alarm, knowing that they are exercising some sort of insidious control over people. I can just hear them going "Bwahahaha! I have the power to piss people off !" Or even worse, it could be a marketing strategy. Maybe they want us to hate our phones so we’ll go out and get a new one. The only thing that is keeping me from throwing mine out the window is my year and a half contract. Just you wait, Phone, in a few more months you’ll be lying in the street wondering just what you did wrong. In the meantime, if I do a little voodoo ritual on it, will it hurt the designer?
           
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"Beep.
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