What is that beeping?

So, yesterday Mr. Jones and I are in our bedroom when we hear :

Bwee - Do - Deep

A three toned electronic signal that neither of us can identify.

We look at each other, incredulous, what the fuck was that? Both of us check our cell phones, I check my pager (I wear a pager for work, always set on vibrate) nothing. No messages, no pages, no missed calls.

Weird. We forget it and go about our business. Some hours later we hear it again:

Bwee - Do - Deep

I am strangely compelled to go over the the piano and map out the notes. I resist that idea and once again we check the phones and the pager and nothing. What the fuck is that? Can’t pin point it. It’s definitely coming from our bedroom but we can’t pin point the sound to a location or device.

All night long, at somewhat regular intervals (every couple of hours) we hear it:

Bwee - Do - Deep

It woke me up at least twice. I dreamed about it. Heard it again this morning while I was getting ready.

Then, I’m sitting here at work in my cubicle and I hear it again:

Bwee - Do - Deep

:eek: It’s followed me from home and it’s here, with me and appears to be coming from my person! I check my cell phone, nope. Check my pager and see a teeny, tiny little symbol on the display that looks like a battery. Could that be it? I take the battery out and put in a fresh one and the little symbol is gone. So is the mysterious beeping.

My previous pager, when in vibrate mode, would only vibrate when the battery was low, apparently this new pager (I’ve only had it a month or two) goes

Bwee - Do - Deep

:smack:

New Microwave? Ours beeps if you heat something up and forget to take it out. About every 1/2 hour or so.

I hate the mysterious beepings. My pager beeps occasionally as a warning when the battery is starting to get low and then constantly when it really needs to be changed. The pre-warning annys the crap out of me because it’s a one time beep and you can’t find where it’s coming from because it only does it once. I have to reset the time on that damn thing every time I take out the battery and batteries only last about a month, I hate it.
I had this happen before where I never found the source, I think it was some old unused item in a drawer some where and the battery finally died and stopped the beeping.

Seen any little gray guys with geat big eyes? :slight_smile:

The smoke detector on low battery and the answering machine with new messages freaked me out the first time they went off.

I can’t figure out why it’s beeping and not vibrating since I have it on silent mode but maybe I should RTFM. :slight_smile:

My cellphone does the same thing - even when it’s on silent or vibrate, it Bwoop-doops whenever the battery starts dying, which is really annoying. Especially for the people who have to listen to it when it starts dying on my lunch hour. Seriously - if it’s on silent, it should BE SILENT - I’d rather have no notification than a bwoop-doop every 2 minutes.

brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrtt

That’s the sound a pager makes when you set it on vibrate during the movie, then come home and lay it on a big wooden table, having forgotten to put it back on ring. Took us an hour one day to figure out what brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrtt was.

I also had qweep every 10 minutes or so for an entire weekend in my old apartment, before I finally figured out it was the smoke detector requesting a new battery. This started, of course, at 3 am.

Bwee - Do - Deep Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope. Bwee - Do - Deep

Sorry about that. My R2 unit has a low battery.

I had a similar problem with a pager–bweep every other hour. Drove me up a tree. No longer have that pager.

But the worse is a smoke alarm that is responding to smoke that has nothing to do with one’s house. Every once and while our area has forest/brush fires and the smoke travels for miles and sets off our smoke detector. It happened in 2001-January. After a week of false alarms and no sleep I unplugged the fool things and cleaned them with canned air and a lightly moistened paper towel. It solved the problem.

They need to come up with a voice clip instead of a sound. If the fool smoke detector would indicate low battery by announcing,“LOW BATTERY!” every two hours for a day or two it would so much better for our collective blood pressure. That and “CLEAN ME-I’m dusty”. is that too much to hope for?

:smiley:

Heh. Something like that happened to me once. I was at my Mom’s place enjoying a cup of tea and I heard music. No one else was home. I wandered downstairs to the laundry room. Eerily, the music appeared to be coming from there, but there was no obvious source of music there. I wandered upstairs and the thin reedy music was there too. No radio playing. No computer was turned on. No obvious electronic gadgetry of any sort was present. This was a poser. I put down my mug to think about it. And the music stopped. I picked up the mug and the music started again.

The mug was a present from one of her students and it played carols when the light hit it.

My phone has two different settings - “Silent” and “Silence All”. Check and see if yours has the same.

Re: Phantom beeps…My girlfriend and I were going crazy for weeks trying to find a phantom beep that sounded like it was coming from the kitchen. Finally one day I bent down to grab something and with my ear in just the right spot I realized it was coming from her laptop! Not only was this thing beeping at us, it was throwing its beeps to make them sound like they were coming from somewhere else!

We still don’t know why it beeps. It’s always plugged in so the battery never gets below 100%.

I work at a summer camp. When I go up at the first thaw to check things out, the smoke detectors all have low batteries. Nothing is quite as errie as hearing a dozen or so "beep"s echoing across the snow in the woods, 30 miles from anything. Especially when you’re alone, at night…

/clutches shotgun

A story of a mysterious noise that was not electronic in nature.

One day shortly after my birthday, I went to retrieve something from the oven. When I stood back up, I heard this eerie ring noise. It wasn’t electronic, it didn’t rattle or vibrate or anything, just a quiet, pure tone which went on and on. I was starting to get seriously creeped out when all of a sudden I realized what the source of the sound was.

My new windchimes!

Living in an apartment where I almost never open the windows, I had decided that the dainty windchimes I recieved for my birthday would be best situated in the doorway by the oven. (The doorway between the kitchenette and the dining area). They almost touch one wall, so as to allow me to walk through the doorway without touching them. If I turn on the ceiling fan or brush the windchimes on purpose, all five notes will ring. But if I just open and shut the oven, sometimes only one chime will be disturbed, and I get this really eerie ring.

Another non-electronic sound…

I was sitting in my living room when I heard my cat mewling someone pitifully in the kitchen. Alarmed, I go into the kitchen, and find her sitting on the table, looking at me a little guiltily (she wasn’t allowed on the table). I ask her what the matter is, when I hear it again. Now, I’m looking directly at my cat, and it’s clearly not her, but it sounds exactly like her.

I looked out the window, and there was a bird (I’ve since forgotten the name, but it was red-headed) sitting on one of the branches. The sound happened again, and it was very clearly coming from this bird. Bizarre.

I think there is a chip in all smoke detectors and alarms that causes them to make their low battery noise in the middle of the night when one is sleeping. You would think that since people only sleep about 8 hours a day and there are 24 hours in a day that the odds are once in a while it will beep during the day, but nooooooo! it’s always at 3 or 4 am.
I will see your mysterious beeps and raise you a mysterious squeak. It sounds a little beepy, but it turns out to be a squeak. I was hearing this for ages until I realised it was one of those attic fan thingys that sits on the roof. The problem is I can’t tell if it’s mine or my neighbor’s and even if it is mine, I have no idea how to MAKE IT STOP SQUEAKING! On breezy days I nearly go insane from the squeaking.

I moved into a house once and once a day past Midnight, you would here a soft beep beep. Having only got up to pee or get a drink, I was reluctant to go exploring(after all it was past Midnight). Well one day, I noticed it stopped. When it got time to move a couple of years later, while removing cleaning products from under the sink, I moved a board that was covering the bottom of the cabinet and found a casio clock set for 1 in the morning. :rolleyes:

As we speak, there is a beeping noise in my house, and I’ve determined its coming from the hallway fire alarm detector. It’s sort of giving me a headache and I am debating whether I will be able to take a nap with this going off every 40 seconds.

Go into the attic with a can of WD-40.

But what if it’s not even my squeaky thing? What do I do if it’s my neighbors?

Besides, it’s scary up there in the attic. :frowning: