March 29, 2017 Article

The Old Coot endures the racket.

By Merlin Lessler

It’s getting noisy out there. Oh sure, civilization has always been a little noisy, once we climbed down from the trees and moved into caves. Roaring sabretooth tigers and bellowing mammoths raised the sound level. And a millennium later, it was civilization: horses clomping down the lane, good old boys whooping it up in the town square, music blaring from pubs and bistros and bagpipes screeching across the moors. Add “choo choo” trains streaming through town, church bells, fire alarms, police whistles and you have a noisy world.

Then, the automobile made the scene, an immense noise maker: the roar of the engine, the blaring of the exhaust, horns honking and the crinkle of metal and sirens, as emergency vehicles rush to the scene of a crash.

And still, there was more to come. Electronics! Quiet at first, until boom boxes made the scene, the final step in the evolution from the crystal , that was so quiet, you had to use head phones to catch the whisper of sound coming across the airwaves, turned up the volume. The culprits of new noise are many. First and foremost, the cell phone. That tiny little device that demands so much of our attention. It started as a simple phone, but has evolved into a nanny. Beeping that it’s finished booting up, moaning that it’s running out of juice, and when the battery drops into the teens, begging and yelling in a panic, “Plug me in!” It beeps and burps as it goes through the day, acting as a personal assistant, reminding us of that 10 o’clock dentist appointment, taking over the function that we humans used to be so proud of, our memories, when we recited poems, rattled off phone numbers, addresses and people’s names. No More!

It’s become a bossy nag, warning us that a storm is headed our way, a blockage in traffic lies ahead, a new e-mail awaits in the in-box, a friend has posted something on Facebook, a text message came in, and occasionally back to its roots, a phone call, demanding to be answered. Our phone is so important, we handle it with more care than a newborn baby, cradling it as though it were fragile as an egg. The second it starts to whimper we rush to attach it to a USB cord, the electronic equivalent of an umbilical cord.

 Cell phones aren’t the only modern convenience that add to the din. Warning alerts and beeps fill the air from all sorts of devices, immersing us in a symphony of sound. Microwaves tell us our hot dog is done, cars remind us to fasten our seat belts or that a vehicle is coming along side in the blind spot. Trucks and construction vehicles beep when they back up. Everything we use, produces one kind of a beep or another. Even the washing machine and dryer boss us around, “I’m done; take the clothes out” says the washer. “Me too,” says the dryer, “or, everything will be wrinkled.”

We don’t have to remember anything. Some computer chip or circuit board will do it for us. That’s nice I guess, but it’s getting noisier and nosier out there.  

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