Phone tone rage (PTR)
A Kalgoorlie Miner columnist, Kitty Prodonovich, wrote today about “phone tone rage” (PTR).
It is quite amazing how the repetitive tones from an innocent little phone can incite so much anger and frustration, but they do. And it’s not just the phone rings; you can also have different sound for message alerts and other thing. One of the guys I work with has an extremely loud whistle every time he gets a text message, which fools me every time. And yes, it does bring out the PTR in me. I basically just want to smash his phone each time it whistles.
Kitty admits to variously having Barry Manilow singing Copacabana and WHAM’s “Wake me up before you go go” driving her friends and colleagues mad.
She mentions the embarrassment of mobile phones ringing at inappropriate moments.
I was actually at a funeral some time ago, when someone’s phone rang and The Simpsons theme song bellowed out with great amplification because of the impressive acoustics of the church. What made it worse was that the person didn’t actually answer it or fish for it to turn it off (possibly so no one would know who it was), so it just rang and rang and rang. Finally it finished only to be followed by an encore performance of Homer’s famous “Doh”, as a message alert.
That reminds me of this post when a mobile phone rang during Good Friday Mass.
Kitty’s comments though are topical because ringtones have become so diverse and annoying. People set their phones to have a different ring for different people. The phone of one of my colleagues squawks like a chicken when one of her designated callers rings.
The other interesting thing about Kitty’s column is the reminder that we used to have phones that we actually dialled and they “rang” like a bell when someone called us. Kitty’s sister Robin wrote in reply:
There was something very good about physically dialling a number … it helped me to remember the number … and made me stop for a minute before I spoke (always a good thing for me!). And there’s also the handpiece, it had a bit of weight to it which I liked.
Wow, I’m only 39 and I can remember phones that needed to be “dialled”, rather than have their buttons pressed. It seems like something from a different century.
I agree with Robin. Communication was more calculated in those days. Today it is spontaneous and that breeds trouble in some instances,
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In my office is a bloke I’d hate to drive with. That is if his reaction time in a car is as slow as his reaction time to his horrible ring tone. It’s had me looking at illegal mobile phone jammers on the web I can tell you.
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