Learning a new language

It used to be that alarms went off only in my head, and that was bad enough.

“Did I turn off the iron?”

“Oh no, I forgot to put out the garbage.”

And listening to those alarms go off in my head would have caused me to have something like a panic attack. Maybe two on a scale of one to ten. But nevertheless, those alarms kept me from sleepwalking through life.

But now days, there is an alarm going off every five minutes or so and most of them aren't in my head.

I was making a list of the things that beep, buzz, whistle, bong, sing, or ring at you and me. There are cell phones, Ipods, all kinds of proprietary machinery, washers, dryers, irons, toasters, ovens, alarm clocks, cars, computers, printers, GPS devices, timers, cameras, cash registers, gas pumps, fish finders… Many of those devices issue a variety of sounds in succession, in rhythm or in a pattern. Some of them play music and some of them blink at you too.

Every beep has a different message for you. “Almost empty, my battery is dying, you pushed the wrong button, add toner, cycle done, you've got mail, don't burn the cookies, don't burn the house down, out of focus, out of oil, use the flash, and on and on.

The trouble is I don't speak Droid very well. In fact I am usually looking around for a Droid interpreter. If I get myself in a room with a bunch of Droid-speaking devices and they all start beeping at once, there will be trouble. What happens is that when multiple alarms go off and I can't take care of all of them at once, the stresses start to add up and soon I am in a ten-out-of-ten condition. I start to suffer from deep beep overload which I demonstrate by two-stepping jerkily from one device to another while I try to understand which is saying what and how urgent the various messages are.

Sitting down to take a deep breath doesn't help much either. What is that other squeak-squeek” sound I hear? I can't tell where it is coming from. Wait, that's my desk chair creaking.

Driving out on the road presents a possibility of running into beep overload as well. Try interpreting and processing in a split second more than one beeping sound while driving through the turnabout.

“Eeeek! (You will notice that I have begun to utter droid-like sounds, but that doesn't mean I am fluent.) Should I answer the cell phone, study the dashboard, or get out of that Volkswagen's way?”

Perhaps some people could do all three, but not I. First I would have to find my cell phone which goes to show you what beep overload can do to me.

One of the most unhappy devices ever to speak Droid is the desktop computer. Some days it will issue complaining noises at a rate of every twenty keystrokes. What ensues is a condition closely related to beep overload in some ways.

However, this condition is characterized by an outburst of actual, spoken, English words—words words like -bleep-bleep-bleep-.