Joe Palca: Annoying

That brings us to our second ingredient in the recipe for what’s annoying. Whatever it is—a buzzing mosquito, a pestering child, a dripping faucet, or half of a cell phone conversation—it has to be unpleasant. Not horrible, not deadly, just mildly discomfiting. Whether halfalogues are distracting because they’re rude or rude because they’re distracting, it’s rare to listen to someone else’s cell phone conversation and enjoy it. Some things are inherently unpleasant—the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard probably falls in this category—and others are more unique to the individual. Some people find being stuck in traffic unpleasant; others don’t seem to mind a bit.

Overheard cell phone conversations point to a third and final ingredient in the perfect recipe for annoyance: the certainty that it will end, but the uncertainty of when. To be annoyed requires some impatience on your part. The conversation could be finished in a few more seconds, or maybe it will stretch on for another hour—it’s the knowledge that the unpleasantness will come to an end soon that gives a particular situation an edge, a sense of urgency. That is, your annoyance is related to your sense of optimism. Your hope that it will be over amplifies every additional second that you have to put up with it.

Annoyance is probably the most widely experienced and least studied of all human emotions. How do we know that? We don’t really. There is no Department of Annoying Studies or annoyingologists. There are no data, no measurements of how many people are annoyed or how annoyed people are, no investigations into what makes people annoyed, and no systematic looks at how people cope with annoyance. In fact, if you talk to psychologists, practitioners of a scientific discipline that one would think would have grappled with annoyance, you get the feeling that there might not be such a thing as annoyance at all.

So we set out to try to understand this feeling by mining the science in every field. There’s no dearth of relevant research. A vast literature exists on anger, aversion, acoustics, social anthropology, and chemical irritants, but few scientists have thought about these things in terms of how they help explain annoyance. That’s what this book sets out to do. Buzzing flies, car alarms, skunk odors, bad habits, terrible music, idiotic employers, recalcitrant spouses, and more. Tell people you’re writing a book on the annoyingness of modern life, and you’ll soon realize what a tetchy species we humans are.

Cell phones aside, the trouble with cataloging annoyances is that there seem to be few universals in what we find unpleasant. You may like the smell of aftershave, whereas it annoys your spouse. Pleasures can become pet peeves. You may find your spouse’s way of using a knife cute when you first get together and god-awfully annoying after twenty years of marriage. The experience of annoyance is so subjective, so context dependent, that it’s hard to nail down. This may be why researchers don’t tend to think of annoyance as a separate emotion. “From my perspective, annoyance is mild anger,” says James Gross, a psychologist at Stanford University. “And there’s a huge literature on anger.” Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, warns, “You have to be careful to distinguish annoyance from aversion.” “It’s hard to distinguish annoyance from frustration,” says University of Florida psychologist Clive Wynne.

Emotions are sometimes plotted on a chart with positive/negative on one axis and arousal/calm on the other axis. “Annoyance would be arousal-negative. But it’s a subtle one, isn’t it?” asks Dr. Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist and the director of the Evolution and Human Adaptation Program at the University of Michigan. “It’s not quite rage. It’s not quite anger. It doesn’t fit real nicely on those valences.” Annoyance seems to be its own thing. It’s possible that defining annoyance is as difficult as Justice Potter Stewart found defining pornography to be: “I know it when I see it.” Knowing it when you see it, however, isn’t always good enough. In some lines of work, you need to be an expert in being annoying just to get through the day.

Summer 2010 was a hot one for New York City. Spring came early, and once the warm weather set in, it didn’t lift for most of the summer. A heat wave in July brought temperatures to the triple digits for several days, in and around town. People were desperate for relief. Hydrants were hacked; hoses, uncoiled. Side streets became mini water parks. Pool admissions were up.

July 6 was the real scorcher. It reached 103 degrees that day—breaking an eight-year record. According to the New York Daily News , since 1869, when officials began to keep temperature records in New York City, only three days have been hotter.

That was a busy day for the New York Fire Department’s Emergency Medical Service. It received 4,225 calls, about 30 percent more than usual, the New York Times reported. It was the fifth busiest day for the service in eight years.

When you call 911 in New York City, you first talk to a call-receiving operator called a CRO. (There are a lot of annoying acronyms in emergency medicine.) The CRO is trained to ask a series of questions to determine whether the emergency requires medical attention. If it does, an emergency medical services (EMS) dispatcher—who is trained as an emergency medical technician (EMT)—gets conferenced into the call. The EMS dispatcher determines what level of response is required: the most serious calls—“segment 1s”—are choking, cardiac or respiratory arrest, and drowning. Segment 1s always get two paramedics, two EMTs, and a team of certified first responders (CFRs), plus the cops often show up.

The New York EMS is run by the Fire Department (FDNY). The FDNY is responsible for first-response care for more than seven million people over three hundred square miles of the New York metropolitan area. It responds to more than a million medical emergencies every year. At any given time, 250 ambulances are on the street. That number can seem even higher if your apartment has street-facing windows.

Will Tung is an FDNY paramedic in Brooklyn. He’s in his late twenties and is also the president of the Park Slope Volunteer Ambulance Corps (PSVAC), which is located in the basement of a narrow brick building on a tree-lined street on the fringe of downtown Brooklyn and the neighborhood of Park Slope. The PSVAC responded to more than five hundred emergencies last year—from direct phone calls or through calls from the FDNY in times of high call volume. With thirty-six active members, the corps is made up entirely of volunteers. It was started back in the early 1990s, when people were concerned about the lagging response times for EMS in the neighborhood. Someone is standing by on most nights. During the day, you get a voice message instructing you to call 911 if you’re looking for help.

In 2009, the average response time for FDNY EMS calls was eight minutes, twenty-seven seconds. In addition to choking and cardiac and respiratory arrests, the most serious calls included snakebites, asthma attacks, gunshots, stabbings, major burns, electrocution, and other traumas. The average response time for these calls was six minutes, forty-one seconds.

If you’ve ever driven in New York City, you know that getting anywhere in six minutes is a remarkable feat. It can take that long to get out of your parking spot, let alone across town. EMS vehicles, of course, are equipped with tools to help them part the automotive seas—namely, lights and sirens.

The original siren was part lady, part monster, and had a knack for luring men by means of irresistible song. The word has taken on new meaning since then—nowadays, most people would not say they’re irresistibly drawn to sirens.