Annoying
The Science of What Bugs UsBy Joe Palca Flora Lichtman
John Wiley & Sons
Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-63869-9
Chapter One
A Noise Annoys
Summer 2010 was a hot one for New York City. Spring came early, and once the warm weather set in, it didn't lift for most of the summer. A heat wave in July brought temperatures to the triple digits for several days, in and around town. People were desperate for relief. Hydrants were hacked; hoses, uncoiled. Side streets became mini water parks. Pool admissions were up.
July 6 was the real scorcher. It reached 103 degrees that day—breaking an eight-year record. According to the New York Daily News, since 1869, when officials began to keep temperature records in New York City, only three days have been hotter.
That was a busy day for the New York Fire Department's Emergency Medical Service. It received 4,225 calls, about 30 percent more than usual, the New York Times reported. It was the fifth busiest day for the service in eight years.
When you call 911 in New York City, you first talk to a call-receiving operator called a CRO. (There are a lot of annoying acronyms in emergency medicine.) The CRO is trained to ask a series of questions to determine whether the emergency requires medical attention. If it does, an emergency medical services (EMS) dispatcher—who is trained as an emergency medical technician (EMT)—gets conferenced into the call. The EMS dispatcher determines what level of response is required: the most serious calls—"segment 1s"—are choking, cardiac or respiratory arrest, and drowning. Segment 1s always get two paramedics, two EMTs, and a team of certified first responders (CFRs), plus the cops often show up.
The New York EMS is run by the Fire Department (FDNY). The FDNY is responsible for first-response care for more than seven million people over three hundred square miles of the New York metropolitan area. It responds to more than a million medical emergencies every year. At any given time, 250 ambulances are on the street. That number can seem even higher if your apartment has street-facing windows.
Will Tung is an FDNY paramedic in Brooklyn. He's in his late twenties and is also the president of the Park Slope Volunteer Ambulance Corps (PSVAC), which is located in the basement of a narrow brick building on a tree-lined street on the fringe of downtown Brooklyn and the neighborhood of Park Slope. The PSVAC responded to more than five hundred emergencies last year—from direct phone calls or through calls from the FDNY in times of high call volume. With thirty-six active members, the corps is made up entirely of volunteers. It was started back in the early 1990s, when people were concerned about the lagging response times for EMS in the neighborhood. Someone is standing by on most nights. During the day, you get a voice message instructing you to call 911 if you're looking for help.
In 2009, the average response time for FDNY EMS calls was eight minutes, twenty-seven seconds. In addition to choking and cardiac and respiratory arrests, the most serious calls included snakebites, asthma attacks, gunshots, stabbings, major burns, electrocution, and other traumas. The average response time for these calls was six minutes, forty-one seconds.
If you've ever driven in New York City, you know that getting anywhere in six minutes is a remarkable feat. It can take that long to get out of your parking spot, let alone across town. EMS vehicles, of course, are equipped with tools to help them part the automotive seas—namely, lights and sirens.
The original siren was part lady, part monster, and had a knack for luring men by means of irresistible song. The word has taken on new meaning since then—nowadays, most people would not say they're irresistibly drawn to sirens.
Sirens are designed to be annoying. If they didn't get your attention or you could tune them out, they would not be effective. If you find sirens irritating, just imagine what it's like for people inside the siren-equipped vehicle. "Sirens are really annoying," says Tung. "When you're a pedestrian, it passes." For everybody in the ambulance, it doesn't go away. Tung generally keeps the windows rolled up to cut down on noise. When the windows are open and the siren is blasting, it's hard to hear anything else.
* * *
Sirens are related to another particularly modern kind of annoyance: the intrusive electronic beeps and blips from appliances, computers, phones, and other devices on which we depend. As annoying (and useful) as many of those can be, no one is ever glad to hear an electronic beep that they can't quite place.
Picture the scene: it's Christmastime in a Detroit suburb. Christmas is a wonderful time of the year and also a supremely annoying time of year. Airports are choked. So are roads. Stores are full of desperate shoppers continually frustrated by the endless search for the perfect gift.
Yet if there are certain annoyances intrinsic to holidays, it takes a special kind of person to insert an additional annoyance on purpose. You can find such a person at the annual Christmas gathering at the home of Bob and Sue Johnson. The Johnson family really exists; we simply changed some names.
The house is a sprawling affair. There is a large, sunken dining room with a two-story ceiling. Even an eight-foot-tall Christmas tree sitting on a table is swallowed by the room's vastness.
On the south wall, picture windows reveal a large yard, and because this is Michigan in the winter, the yard is usually obligingly covered with snow. The Johnsons' three children and seven grandchildren do a pretty good job of occupying every corner of the house.
Uncle Ted takes Christmas very seriously, especially the assembling of Christmas stockings. Each year, he brings a bag of stocking stuffers. The bag contains candy, the latest squoosh ball, and the occasional key chain with a miniature Swiss Army knife or nameplate attached.
Ted is a bit of a gadget geek and usually finds some low-cost but high-tech toy to throw into the mix. For Christmas 2009, Ted introduced his extended family to what must be considered the perfect toy for this book: the Annoy-a-tron.
The Annoy-a-tron is made of a small piece of printed circuit board about the size of a quarter. In addition to the on-off switch, there is a small speaker and a magnet. The Annoy-a-tron generates a short (but eponymously annoying) beep at random intervals every few minutes. Given its size and the short duration of the beep, figuring out where the noise is coming from is extremely difficult. Because the noise is soft, you're not quite sure you heard it. Because the noise is random, you can't predict when it will occur. So even if you become obsessed with finding the source, it will take an annoyingly long time to pinpoint it.
The Annoy-a-tron has the requisite ingredients to be annoying: it's unpleasant, it's unpredictable, and it leads you to falsely believe that it will end any second. It is especially ingenious because it's only barely unpleasant. It's not exactly cruel, although it's so unpredictable and just beyond reach that it's perfectly torturous.
For the Annoy-a-tron, you can choose between two different frequencies for the beep tone. According to the sales literature, the "2 kHz sound is generically annoying enough, but if you really, really want to aggravate somebody, select the 12 kHz sound. Trust us." The higher frequency and the slight "electronic noise" built into that beep tone is really grating.
Now, Uncle Ted is a sweet guy. He's patient and loving with his parents, generous with his nieces and nephews, and helpful in the kitchen. Yet that didn't stop him on Christmas day from attaching an Annoy-a-tron to the underside of the metal frame of the coffee table in the living room and switching it on.
Even though most of the gathering knew about the Annoy-a-tron, at least those who had carefully examined the contents of their Christmas stockings, people still seemed miffed by the occasional muffled beeping. At first, it was simply confusing.
"Did you hear something?"
"I think so."
"I didn't."
"There it is again."
"I heard it that time."
"Where's it coming from?"
After half an hour, Ted took pity on those who hadn't figured out what was happening. After all, he's a sweet guy.
The reason the Annoy-a-tron is hard to locate probably has more to do with the brevity of the tone than the frequency. We humans with two working ears are pretty good at determining where a sound is coming from. Except for really low tones or sounds that are directly in front of us, the sound will be slightly louder in the ear that is closer to sound than in the one farther away. That's because some of the sound is absorbed by our (thick) heads. Lucas C. Parra, a professor of biomedical engineering at the City College of the City University of New York, says that by swiveling our heads, we are able to get a better fix on where a sound is coming from, because as our heads move, the sound will get closer or farther from one ear. "But to move, we need a bit of time," says Parra. "If the tone is very short, then we do not have enough time to accumulate information as to which orientation/location is the strongest source of sound."
What's more, Parra says that the 12-kHz sound may not be all that annoying to many adults, because with age there is high-frequency hearing loss, and 12 kHz is too high a tone for many of us to hear.
It's not surprising that the Annoy-a-tron is sold by a company called ThinkGeek, an online site that offers "Stuff for smart masses." Uncle Ted seems to favor this site. He bought several of the Annoy-a-trons, as well as its cousin the Eviltron, which is basically the same thing but has a bigger speaker and makes noises like unidentifiable scratching sounds, a gasping last breath, a sinister child laughing, and an eerie whispering of "Hey, can you hear me?"
The Annoy-a-tron has been a good seller for ThinkGeek. "It's a pretty inexpensive, fun item," says ThinkGeek cofounder Scott Smith. "I think the fun factor to cost ratio is very good. We've gotten a lot of letters from people who put them in coworkers' offices and gotten a lot of entertainment value out of them." Boy, have they gotten letters. Here's one testimonial they've published on their Web site:
Dear friends at thinkgeek.com,
I recently acquired the "Annoy-A-Tron" from your web site. Actually, I acquired two, thinking that perhaps two devices might be necessary to truly splinter the minds of my friends and co-workers. How woefully did I underestimate this powerful tool.
I have watched this simple device transform a (until-now) mild-mannered colleague into a spitting, cussing, paranoid lunatic.
He has ordered all of the staff he supervises (not a small number) to locate the source of the dreaded beeping before doing anything else (but since they are in on the prank, they haven't been much help). So he waits, white-knuckles gripping the edge of his desk, anticipating the next beep.
He speculates that "they" might be doing air-quality testing in the building. This beep must be some device in the ducts detecting dangerous levels of asbestos in the air. Or worse. Radon? Aerosolized mercury? Legionella spores?
The beep means something. What does the beep mean? Is it a warning? It sounds urgent, doesn't it? It's telling us to do something. But what? Replace a battery? Call the authorities? Evacuate the premises? Scrub ourselves with disinfectant and put on haz-mat suits and call our families to give them our tearful goodbyes?
I imagine that soon he will begin to take things apart. He will methodically dismantle all of the electrical devices in his office, creating an unusually precise metaphor for what is happening in his psyche.
I am reminded what a thin and fragile thread keeps us attached to sanity. Today, this tiny little device helped me break a co-worker's mind, and I thank you for the sinfully pleasurable schadenfreude.
My best to you, John Seattle, WA
Uncle Ted bought the original Annoy-a-tron. ThinkGeek has since released the Annoy-a-tron 2.0. The newer model is slightly larger and has a few more sounds and a volume control. It's also more expensive. How do you take something that already seems perfectly annoying and improve it? And, why would you?
When volunteers join the Park Slope Volunteer Ambulance Corps, many have to be taught how to drive an ambulance in New York City, which includes siren protocols. Dale Garcia, who has been with the PSVAC for eighteen years and is now the executive officer at the corps, says that his training method is fear-based. "I make them terrified to drive, and then I make them drive." It's all about confidence building, he says.
Sirens are an important component of driving an ambulance. In New York City, ambulances are required to turn on their lights and sirens when responding to emergency calls. That also goes for volunteer ambulance drivers, such as those at the Park Slope Corps. It sounds like a reasonable law, but it doesn't always seem that way to Garcia, who dislikes annoying his neighbors with the noise at 4 a.m. when the streets are empty.
One of the few ground rules for using sirens is that if you're going through an intersection, you're instructed to change the siren call. Studies have shown, and common sense confirms, that intersections pose the greatest risk for collisions between EMS vehicles and everything else. The idea is that the change in sound makes the siren harder to ignore. This is a fact that has become so familiar it's easy to lose sight of how astonishing it really is: even an ambulance siren can fade into the background if it's too predictable.
The use of a siren seems to be more an art than a science. In the basement of the corps, Will Tung takes out a marker and draws a diagram of the sirens available to him and his preferred style. "There are three siren tones. The Wail—which is the classic waahh wow waahh wow. The Yelp, which is a faster wail. And the third one—I call it the phaser. It sounds sort of like nails scratching a chalkboard. Each steps up in rapidness. I usually leave it on Wail, and approaching an intersection I go to Yelp and then back to Wail." He pulls out the phaser only for real tough jams.
In addition to being annoying, part of what makes a siren effective is that people recognize it as a siren. There are nationwide standards, set out largely by the Society of Automotive Engineers, that guide siren makers on what frequencies of sound are designated for emergency vehicles. The frequencies haven't changed significantly over the years, according to one siren maker, but siren users have gotten creative.
In one of the corps ambulances, on an industrial block in downtown Brooklyn, Tung demonstrates the sirens. Where the cup holder is in your car, there's the "Whelan" in this ambulance. There's a red switch to turn it on and off and a knob that can be set to T3 (that's the phaser), Yelp, Wail, HF (for handsfree), MAN, PA, and RAD (for radio). There's a button for a synthetic air horn. Fire trucks still have real air horns, Tung says.
Will likes PA for cruising around—"a yelp with a tail," he says. It's what most FDNY EMS drivers use. There are tricks to remixing the sirens. Certain settings allow you to control them with the horn and the megaphone, allowing for maximum siren control. There are ways to get the sirens to cycle automatically or move up in pitch as they go through the calls. "That gets people to move because it's really annoying," Tung says.
Yet in a city like New York, which not only never sleeps but never really shuts up either, sirens aren't always annoying enough. Dale Garcia and Will Tung agreed that many drivers either don't or can't seem to get out of the way of an ambulance.
Garcia thinks that New Yorkers may be especially good at ignoring things. For example, one bitter cold night on 3rd Avenue and 5th Street in Brooklyn, a car caught on fire. When Garcia arrived, thirty-foot flames were shooting out of the car. Fortunately, there was space around the vehicle, and Garcia parked the ambulance near the car to block off the area and keep people at a safe distance. Then, in what seemed like an (almost) impossible New York minute, a man came up to Garcia's ambulance, knocked on the window, and said, "Could you move your ambulance? I'd like to park my car."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Annoyingby Joe Palca Flora Lichtman Copyright © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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