Yesterday I was walking through the Chinatown area of Queens, and went into one of those narrow but tall four-story malls they have there. It was absolutely teeming with people. On the first floor was a big bustling marketplace. And I heard something strange: a loud voice, from a loudspeaker or radio somewhere, repeating some phrase that sounded Arabic (but I really couldn’t be sure.) It was loud and very annoying. Every five seconds or so, the recording would be repeated. I guess it was on an endless loop.
I kept walking around, and then a few hours later, came back to that same market. And, still, the disembodied voice was barking out its message, over and over again. I looked around trying to find the source. It was coming from a megaphone on the floor by one of the vegetable tables. I reached down and turned it off.
Why was I the first person in hours to do this? Several hundred people must have walked and stood right next to that megaphone in the hours that it had been on and repeating. Yet nobody did anything. Did they think they would get in some kind of trouble?
Maybe they all understood what it was saying and it made sense for it to be sounding. It was probably saying, “Please come by and sample our fresh tomatoes! One dollar off today only!” You probably killed the vegetable stand’s marketing plan. Good going.
Not an independent vegetable stand, just one of many vegetable tables in a very large market (like a supermarket.) If it was a marketing plan of some kind, it was an idiotic one. Nobody deserved to be subjected to that. And it sure as hell wasn’t Chinese, and 95% of the people in the place were Chinese.
I note that many things that I notice (that annoy the heck out of me) don’t bother others at all.
Especially noise. I hate noise. Guy down the street at 8AM with the leaf blower? Rude inconsiderate ass. BeatMobiles blasting the bass down the street at 1AM (or any time really)? Rude inconsiderate asses. Neighbors who have dogs that bark constantly? Ugh. Blaring television everyone is forced to yell over at dinner parties? OMG.
But, no one else ever complains so it’s go to be me who is the problem.
I have coworkers like that. I remember being off for two days and coming in and immediately noticing a problem. I ask my coworker how long it had been that way. Two days. I asked her what customers were saying. She says, basically, “they get confused and complain but…shrug.” Did she tell management or anyone else? No.
It’s surreal to be surrounded by people who are so apathetic.
If people were only passing through, it may not have been a good use of their time to track down the source of noise to turn it off, so they just ignored it. Nbd.
I don’t know that it would occur to me to have turned it off…I mean, I’m not in any authority at the mall. I just wouldn’t think that it would be for a random passer by to deal with. If I worked there, that would be one thing, but if I’m just visiting, I don’t know.
Yeah, I was thinking along these lines. Everyone there pretty much is in some form of transit; they are passers-by, noticing the noise momentarily then moving on. In that scenario, I could see it potentially staying on for a LONG time. No one stays put long enough to be bothered enough to care. “What’s that noise? Ehh, I don’t know, let’s just go.”
It may have been a cultural thing. I don’t know what the tolerance of Chinese people is for noise, but here in Panama people completely ignore noisy music, barking dogs, and other rackets that would have neighbors calling the police in a microsecond in the US.
When Adam Carolla was co-hosting Loveline on the radio with Dr. Drew, it was surprisingly common for them to notice a smoke alarm’s low-battery chirp in a caller’s background. They’d ask how long it had been chirping, and invariably the caller would mumble smething like, “a few months,” vaguely mystified that anyone would find this noise noteworthy. One caller even explained that the smoke alarm was in her bedroom; for months she’d lived (and even slept) with a smoke alarm chirping at her every thirty seconds, and this didn’t seem at all unusual to her.
The building next door to my apartment is a bank that, for some reason, has been abandoned for the past few years. A while ago, I happened to notice a huge yellow generator had appeared in its parking lot. For a long time, nothing happened.
Then, one quiet evening, we started to hear a loud* cunk-chunk-chunk-chunk *outside out bedroom window. After about half an hour, I pulled on some pants and sneakers and went outside to investigate. As you probably have guessed, someone had turned the generator on.
I looked around. There was no-one nearby, the building was dark, and there didn’t appear to be any wires connected to the generator. I studied it carefully in the dark, and found a button on one of its flanks. I pressed the button. The generator shut down. I went home, pulled off my sneakers and pants, and went to sleep.
We never heard the generator again. A couple of months later, it disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived.
When people get into groups, most of them assume someone else will take charge. My favorite is when I see people standing and chatting as they wait for the elevator - and none of them thinks to press the signal button.
It was a wireless generator. You killed the owner when his life support mysteriously shut down.
I’m obviously joking around with this and with my post about the vegetable stand sale, but that’s generally my attitude with this sort of thing. If I don’t understand why something is making a noise/appearing in the parking lot, I wouldn’t shut the thing down without finding out. My first assumption would be that the noise or the appearance is happening because someone wants it to. If I know what’s going on (like the smoke alarm is beeping), I would take care of it. But unless I know for sure what the story is, it seems like a bad idea to just go around pushing off buttons.
Maybe, but my operating philosophy was that anyone who chose to activate a noisy generator at the edge of a residential neighborhood at 11 o’clock at night was, in all likelihood, an inconsiderate asshole, and deserved whatever they got.
I’m the type of person who will pull over on the highway to remove debris from the road. I’m able bodied and I consider it my duty to deal with things if I can.
But that was someone else’s loud speaker. If it were mine, and I had permission for it to be there, I’d be annoyed that you turned it off. So that’s why I wouldn’t turn it off; not because I’d be afraid “getting in trouble,” but because I don’t like to annoy people.
If it was really annoying, I’d find some authority figure and ask if it could be turned off.
It is an interesting phenomenon. I’ve noticed it in a couple of different ways - if we go to a sporting event, everyone uses the doors that are already opened - no one will be the ones to open the next set over and start using those, too, in spite of them being a perfectly valid choice. It’s the same with garbage cans - if there is no garbage in it already, no one will put garbage in it. When I post any kind of ad with tear-off phone numbers, I always tear the first one off myself to get it started.
I think it’s the human version of a sheep thing - apparently, sheep won’t go anywhere without a goat to start things. Some people are goats, but most people are sheep. I can see evolutionary reasons for this - the ones who hang back and don’t initiate anything don’t get killed first.