I have my cell phone set up to ring with the tune “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” by Primus. The other day I was at shoe store, and that song came on in the store. So I answered my phone. And was surprised that noone was there. It was a good 60 seconds before I realized what had happened.
I’m just surprised that you heard a Primus song at a shoe store!
[Al Bundy]…Dog Will Hunt…[/Al Bundy]
BluMoon, well, this particular shoe store is a Vans store, and in fact it’s half shoe-store and half skate board park if you can believe it. It’s a very cool place.
Not that I’m trying to outdo you or anything. This happened three years ago and I’m smarter now.
My son called me from work on his cell phone (he paid for it, but it was on my bill), to see if I could take him over to a friend’s house. I said okay. Picked him up at work.
We went to the neighborhood and since we are both directionally challenged we spent 36 minutes driving around and getting lost and missing the right turn.
How do I know it was 36 minutes? Because at that point I picked up my cell phone to call my husband (a former taxi driver with a street guide) to beam us into the proper address, and it was already on. And connected to my son’s cell phone.
Aaarggghh! So for 36 minutes we drove around, 2 feet from each other, cell phones in pockets, wasting those precious minutes. At the time this was 1/4 of my monthly minutes but only 36/1000 of my son’s.
The most popular mobile phone brand in Australia in Nokia. Up until recent models, Nokia has only supplied three audio tones for receiving SMS: (i) a single beep; (ii) a morse code signal; and (ii) beep-beep, beep-beep.
The single beep is too unobtrusive and the morse code too frikkin’ annoying. As a result, nearly everyone chooses beep-beep, beep-beep.
Accordingly, everytime beep-beep, beep-beep is heard in a room of young people (the 15-25 year old market demographic being phone saturated), most of us will instintively reach towards our individual electronic babies. Some people will reach into their pockets and some towards their backbacks or handbags. Others will less obtrusively feel the outsides of the pockets to detect whether their phone – a potential source of beep-beep, beep-beep! – is vibrating.
Some radio and TV commericals even replicate beep-beep, beep-beep, leading to sheepish faces as everyone lunges towards their Nokia.
Fortunately, my new polyphonic phone has its own unique SMS tone. 
Beep-beep, beep-beep!
Those are funny ones.
Narrad, back when I was in college, digital watches had just become popular, and there was a “feature” on the early ones where it would beep on the hour. I remember near the end of a lecture especially in a big class, all the watches would go off. Technology is a funny thing.