It has always puzzled me exactly WHO is responsible for all of the irritating and background noise that various technologies produce. Being on a bus or train while someone spends the whole journey using the text on a mobile phone. Nothing wrong with that, except when each time they press a key it emits a beeping sound. This may be the most exciting communication they’ve ever sent but to everyone else its ‘beep…beep-beep….beeeeeeeeeeep…beep! beep! for hours and hours. What’s the purpose? Or laptops that have to make that stoopid Microsoft chord when they boot up. 

Or the latest addition to the canon of useless, pointless but annoying techno-sounds. The car that emits a loud penetrating beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep every time the person locks or unlocks it.  Someone’s just moved into our street with one and it can probably be heard for a distance of about 100 yards at least. It’s loud enough to wake people up (as it did for me this morning). 

Try as I might I can’t work out the point. Is it to help the partially sighted locate their vehicle? Is it to help the confused validate that the vehicle still exists? Is it to help create atomised individuals who only think of themselves and actively work to undermine anything that might be communal and shared? (like peace and quiet in the early morning?).