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That annoying sound

For the past couple of days I have been harassed by a sporadic random beep in my house. Usually when I'm not watching a movie or playing a game it's pretty quiet, so I'd be sitting around in my living room eating, reading, coding, or whatever, and then

beep

One really quick, high pitched beep. Out of nowhere. Worse yet, it was only happening about every ten minutes and wasn't that loud, so it was hard to track down. I'd think it was the microwave timer or something, clear 'em all to be sure, then return to what I was doing, such as writing some code

beep

Maybe the smoke alarm? Nope, it's a lot louder than that. Alarm clock? It's off.

beep

WTF.

Having had enough, I picked up my laptop and started computing at various places on the floor, trying to pick up directional cues as to the location of the sound. Problem is, the sound was so high pitched and quick that I could only tell by hearing that it was roughly left-ish or right-ish of my current position. After a couple of dead ends in the hallway and dining room, I could only determine that it was somewhere in the vicinity of one side of my living room, which strangely enough isn't supposed to have any electronic devices that are plugged in much less powered. An hour later, after hovering around the area while folding various bits of laundry, I had a suspicion that it was coming from a nondescript cardboard box.

Which, when opened and emptied, turned out to have a cordless phone receiver in it.

It turns out, for some dumb reason, that the way this model phone indicates that it is out of its cradle and needs to be charged is that it outputs a single, tenth of a second beep every ten minutes. I had picked this up intending to use it, but had forgotten about it. Apparently this phone is dual-purpose in that if it doesn't work out as a phone, you can plant the receiver near someone you hate as an electronic torture device. Now I'm not so sure I want to use it....

Comments

This blog was originally open for comments when this entry was first posted, but was later closed and then removed due to spam and after a migration away from the original blog software. Unfortunately, it would have been a lot of work to reformat the comments to republish them. The author thanks everyone who posted comments and added to the discussion.