Joe Palca: Annoying

Sirens are designed to be annoying. If they didn’t get your attention or you could tune them out, they would not be effective. If you find sirens irritating, just imagine what it’s like for people inside the siren-equipped vehicle. “Sirens are really annoying,” says Tung. “When you’re a pedestrian, it passes.” For everybody in the ambulance, it doesn’t go away. Tung generally keeps the windows rolled up to cut down on noise. When the windows are open and the siren is blasting, it’s hard to hear anything else.

Sirens are related to another particularly modern kind of annoyance: the intrusive electronic beeps and blips from appliances, computers, phones, and other devices on which we depend. As annoying (and useful) as many of those can be, no one is ever glad to hear an electronic beep that they can’t quite place.

Picture the scene: it’s Christmastime in a Detroit suburb. Christmas is a wonderful time of the year and also a supremely annoying time of year. Airports are choked. So are roads. Stores are full of desperate shoppers continually frustrated by the endless search for the perfect gift.

Yet if there are certain annoyances intrinsic to holidays, it takes a special kind of person to insert an additional annoyance on purpose. You can find such a person at the annual Christmas gathering at the home of Bob and Sue Johnson. The Johnson family really exists; we simply changed some names.

The house is a sprawling affair. There is a large, sunken dining room with a two-story ceiling. Even an eight-foot-tall Christmas tree sitting on a table is swallowed by the room’s vastness.

On the south wall, picture windows reveal a large yard, and because this is Michigan in the winter, the yard is usually obligingly covered with snow. The Johnsons’ three children and seven grandchildren do a pretty good job of occupying every corner of the house.

Uncle Ted takes Christmas very seriously, especially the assembling of Christmas stockings. Each year, he brings a bag of stocking stuffers. The bag contains candy, the latest squoosh ball, and the occasional key chain with a miniature Swiss Army knife or nameplate attached.

Ted is a bit of a gadget geek and usually finds some low-cost but high-tech toy to throw into the mix. For Christmas 2009, Ted introduced his extended family to what must be considered the perfect toy for this book: the Annoy-a-tron.

The Annoy-a-tron is made of a small piece of printed circuit board about the size of a quarter. In addition to the on-off switch, there is a small speaker and a magnet.

The Annoy-a-tron generates a short (but eponymously annoying) beep at random intervals every few minutes. Given its size and the short duration of the beep, figuring out where the noise is coming from is extremely difficult. Because the noise is soft, you’re not quite sure you heard it. Because the noise is random, you can’t predict when it will occur. So even if you become obsessed with finding the source, it will take an annoyingly long time to pinpoint it.

The Annoy-a-tron has the requisite ingredients to be annoying: it’s unpleasant, it’s unpredictable, and it leads you to falsely believe that it will end any second. It is especially ingenious because it’s only barely unpleasant. It’s not exactly cruel, although it’s so unpredictable and just beyond reach that it’s perfectly torturous.

For the Annoy-a-tron, you can choose between two different frequencies for the beep tone. According to the sales literature, the “2 kHz sound is generically annoying enough, but if you really, really want to aggravate somebody, select the 12 kHz sound. Trust us.” The higher frequency and the slight “electronic noise” built into that beep tone is really grating.

Now, Uncle Ted is a sweet guy. He’s patient and loving with his parents, generous with his nieces and nephews, and helpful in the kitchen. Yet that didn’t stop him on Christmas day from attaching an Annoy-a-tron to the underside of the metal frame of the coffee table in the living room and switching it on.

Even though most of the gathering knew about the Annoy-a-tron, at least those who had carefully examined the contents of their Christmas stockings, people still seemed miffed by the occasional muffled beeping. At first, it was simply confusing.

“Did you hear something?”

“I think so.”

“I didn’t.”

“There it is again.”

“I heard it that time.”

“Where’s it coming from?”

After half an hour, Ted took pity on those who hadn’t figured out what was happening. After all, he’s a sweet guy.

The reason the Annoy-a-tron is hard to locate probably has more to do with the brevity of the tone than the frequency. We humans with two working ears are pretty good at determining where a sound is coming from. Except for really low tones or sounds that are directly in front of us, the sound will be slightly louder in the ear that is closer to sound than in the one farther away. That’s because some of the sound is absorbed by our (thick) heads. Lucas C. Parra, a professor of biomedical engineering at the City College of the City University of New York, says that by swiveling our heads, we are able to get a better fix on where a sound is coming from, because as our heads move, the sound will get closer or farther from one ear. “But to move, we need a bit of time,” says Parra. “If the tone is very short, then we do not have enough time to accumulate information as to which orientation/location is the strongest source of sound.”

What’s more, Parra says that the 12-kHz sound may not be all that annoying to many adults, because with age there is high-frequency hearing loss, and 12 kHz is too high a tone for many of us to hear.

It’s not surprising that the Annoy-a-tron is sold by a company called ThinkGeek, an online site that offers “Stuff for smart masses.” Uncle Ted seems to favor this site. He bought several of the Annoy-a-trons, as well as its cousin the Eviltron, which is basically the same thing but has a bigger speaker and makes noises like unidentifiable scratching sounds, a gasping last breath, a sinister child laughing, and an eerie whispering of “Hey, can you hear me?”

The Annoy-a-tron has been a good seller for ThinkGeek. “It’s a pretty inexpensive, fun item,” says ThinkGeek cofounder Scott Smith. “I think the fun factor to cost ratio is very good. We’ve gotten a lot of letters from people who put them in coworkers’ offices and gotten a lot of entertainment value out of them.” Boy, have they gotten letters. Here’s one testimonial they’ve published on their Web site:

Dear friends at thinkgeek.com,

I recently acquired the “Annoy-A-Tron” from your web site. Actually, I acquired two, thinking that perhaps two devices might be necessary to truly splinter the minds of my friends and co-workers. How woefully did I underestimate this powerful tool.

I have watched this simple device transform a (until-now) mild-mannered colleague into a spitting, cussing, paranoid lunatic.

He has ordered all of the staff he supervises (not a small number) to locate the source of the dreaded beeping before doing anything else (but since they are in on the prank, they haven’t been much help). So he waits, white-knuckles gripping the edge of his desk, anticipating the next beep.

He speculates that “they” might be doing air-quality testing in the building. This beep must be some device in the ducts detecting dangerous levels of asbestos in the air. Or worse. Radon? Aerosolized mercury? Legionella spores?

The beep means something. What does the beep mean? Is it a warning? It sounds urgent, doesn’t it? It’s telling us to do something. But what? Replace a battery? Call the authorities? Evacuate the premises? Scrub ourselves with disinfectant and put on haz-mat suits and call our families to give them our tearful goodbyes?