All that beep, bloops and blips isn’t blessed, blast it
By Burton W. Cole
Yes, I am a fully grown man. Overgrown, really. But things that go beep in the night scare me. Daytime beeps, too.
It never stops. Blips, bloops and bleeps control our lives.
The blast of the alarm signals another morning. We bop buttons to blip out the bloops of the clock. Then, as the great philosopher Dolly Parton put it, we “Stumble to the kitchen, pour myself a cup of ambition” — with beeps of a coffeemaker or microwave.
After scanning the bings and boings of texts and emails, and a nearly beep-free shower (unless you forgot to change the battery in the smoke detector), you beep open your car with a push of the key fob. Then the vehicle bleats until your seat belt fastens, blips if you dare choose a route not prescribed by your GPS, bloops across the radio stations, until the car finally boing-boing-boings in the parking lot at work until you turn off the headlights.
The time clock bings, “Get to your station,” the computer bloops, “Get to work,” and then an assortment of copiers, presses, keyboards and whatever other annoying contrivances lurk about the place jump out to beep orders at you all day.
No spouse has ever nagged as intensely as the blips, bloops and bleeps of the beeping devices controlling our lives.
Beep-beeps used to be the sole domain of car horns and the Road Runner. Now, everything beeps — thermostats, treadmills, laptops, doorbells, television channels, washers, dryers, gas pumps, ATMs, fast-food screens, wristwatches or bad words in a movie. It’s blipping annoying.
I didn’t know watching Saturday morning cartoons decades ago that the Road Runner was foretelling my future. It’s enough to drive a person bloopy, er, I mean, loopy.
But don’t seek medical attention. Hospitals are Beep Central.
The second-scariest sound in a hospital is all the machines surrounding your sickbed beeping, blipping and blooping.
“Calm down, Mr. Cole. The beeps assure us that everything’s working just fine.”
Which means the scariest sound in the hospital is when the beeping stops. Or maybe it’s when a once-silent monitor suddenly blip-blip-blips to life — or even worse, belts out bloops and bleeps.
How did all the blasted bleating begin? I suspect pagers, also known as beepers. They were all the rage in the 1990s.
Beepers bipped up between the blaring of the CB radio craze of the 1970s and the bizzzt of the walkie-talkie function on cellphones nonsense of the early 2000s. The bizzzts were added so that you had the ability to use your phone to, you know, TALK to somebody (novel concept for a phone) — with the wonderful feature of letting everyone else at the flea market, for example, hear every blathered word:
“Bzzzt. I found the ripe tomatoes by the southeast gate. Where you at?”
“Bzzzt. I stumbled on a great deal for a broken-down motorcycle.”
“Bzzzt. Don’t you dare bring that home and dump it in with all your other projects in the backyard or so help me, I’ll... BEEP!”
This is why texting gained popularity. It’s totally silent — except for the constant bippity-bip-bip of thumbs on the phone screen and bingity-bings of incoming messages every seven or eight seconds.
But as the Road Runner predicted, that’s life today. Beeps make the world go around.
Personally, the only beeping I want to hear now is the backing-up beeps on the truck as it hauls away all the blips, bloops and bleeps blasting through my life.
Beep-beep.
Buzz Cole at burton.w.cole@gmail.com, the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook or at www.burtonwcole.com. Just beep.