Well, This Is What I Think

Beware a man seeking some peace and time to think.

We have recently completed some renovations at home, Dear Reader, and we now have yet more electrical devices that helpfully go Ding when they want to let us know they’ve done their bit, don’t know how to do their bit, or maybe they’re just feeling lonely because we haven’t sworn at them recently.

We have a toaster. It goes ding. Because two pieces of toast soaring into the air and landing in the dog’s bowl isn’t enough of a clue that it’s done its job successfully.

We have a cooktop. Electric. Swanky looking. It goes peep whenever you press a button. Take a ring all the way up from one to nine and that’s nine peeps. Leave a tea towel within a hundred yards of it’s blinking red diode controls and it peeps. It probably peeps on the hour just to share the existential horror of its owners at the passing of the day, but we haven’t caught it doing that yet.

We have a new oven. It peeps when it gets cold. It peeps when it gets hot. It peeps all the bloody time. It probably peeps hello as you come through the front door. It also has a bell as well as a peep, for when one has inadvertently turned a timer on because one cannot master the buttons. Given time, we will write a multi-instrument symphony for the oven alone.

We have a dishwasher. Leave the door open. Peep. Finish a wash cycle. Peep peep. A celebratory extra peep for shiny, dry dishes.

It lives in the kitchen with the fridge. That doesn’t peep, beep or ding. It bongs. When left open. Weird noise. Booo-ONG. Still, it’s Korean.

It has a little door on the front of it to let you get to the milk faster because it’s just too damn exhausting and time consuming to open, like, the whole fridge door. The little door has to be closed with the precision used to manufacture nuclear centrifuges because leave that open and a sepulchral bong sounds not once, but twice.

If you forget to switch your immaculate new iPhone to airplane mode on retiring you can pretty much guarantee that’s the night, as you lie there desperate for sleep, collapsed with sheer exhaustion, that you are awoken by a new Facebook friend you haven’t spoken to in real life in thirty years messaging you to tell you that he’s getting divorced over that little dalliance with a waitress and could he come stay for a bit. PING!

Do you think he’s ruined his life or is it a fresh start? PING!

Will the kids get over it? PING!

Should he be worried that he’s on his fourth scotch for the night? PING, PING, PING!

(Frighteningly, there’s even a popular iPhone app called, appropriately, Ping!, to send you random “humorous” or “useful” messages during the day. You’d have to really be Johnny No Friends to want that. Sad but true.)

A text message comes in. Buzz, Ding! (Yes, both.) Don’t forget the breakfast meeting at 6.30 am with the client. Except it’s now 4.30 am and you’ve been awake all night after being woken up by the suicidal Facebook friend.

We have a habit of getting in the car and starting the engine and then putting the seatbelt on. This upsets the car, which sings out a warning signal of not one, not two, but FIVE beeps.

Any messages the engine wants to send us – Windscreen washer bottle is empty – really? – we wouldn’t have noticed when we pressed the windscreen washer button and no water came out? – are accompanied by a beep.

As the sensors in the engine are so precise that they measure the coolant fluid dropping by as much as one one thousandth of a millimetre from full-to-overflowing – the only state it will accept for all oils and fluids – there are at least three beeps every time we start the engine, to go with the five reminding us to put our belt on.

While driving, the engine will sometimes send other messages – BEEP! – so randomly as to nearly cause us to drive off the road in shock, Mozart’s Requiem rudely interrupted to let us know that the boot isn’t so much open as just bored.

They’re building a home behind us. They start on site at 7am. The man on the little digger machine thingy who is digging drainage ditches has a device that makes his thing go beep beep beep (at a horribly screechy, high pitch designed to terrify dogs and cause them pain) when he’s reversing. Which we can just about see the common sense of, except he’s on the site on his own. So the only people he’s warning of his sudden backwards lurch are hundreds of yards away.

And they’re trying to get a lie in, after cancelling the breakfast meeting.

You know what cracks us up? The things that go ping in hospitals, on big imposing pingy machines next to very sick people. Ping, every time your heart beats. Ping if your blood pressure goes up. Or down. Or you wink, or move. You know how they reckon people in comas can hear you talking to them? Can you imagine days, weeks, months or worse lying immobile next to a machine that goes ping? Oh, the humanity of it.

Ding, beep, ping, pong, dong, bongy devices: you’re right. That is a shotgun in our backpack.

We are not even pretending to be rational. You have been warned.