Warning!  Warning!

The way alarms are set up has changed over the years.

One of the reliable background noises of a suburban shopping mall is the occasional car alarm.  Like all alarms, they are designed to get your attention: loud, varying in tone and pattern, almost impossible to ignore even a long suburban distance away.  Nowadays they last for at most a few minutes before the owner manages to silence them, but we recall when there was no automatic notification and they could last for hours.  We would like to nominate them for the position of most-annoyance-for-least-effect of all features of modern life, based on the fact that among us we must have heard thousands of them, not one of which was an actual attempt to break into a car.

We are surrounded by alarms.  We include “notifications,” sounds (more rarely visual signals) intended to get your attention for some reason or other.  Many warn of impending or existing emergencies, like fire alarms.  (One of our consultants used to live in a housing complex with a fire alarm, but it only made a loud sound; it did not actually notify the fire department.  No doubt it would have been useful to get people out of neighboring apartments, but we suspect it was only put in for insurance reasons.  In the event, it only went off when water-pipes burst during a long freezing spell.)  Our navigator of course remembers the loss-of-steering and engine-room-emergency alarms on the bridge of his last ship.  However, the most insistent and urgent-sounding alarm came from the copy machine when it was out of paper.

That is an example, we suggest, of a shift in the philosophy of putting in alarms.  In the past, the question was asked by the operator: what do I need to know about right away?  Fire, flooding, loss of lube oil, whatever you’d call out the fire department or the police for.  And mechanical/electric alarms had to be installed separately, one for each condition.  So their numbers were limited, and operators were expected to monitor the condition of their equipment by other means so as not to be surprised by emergencies.

That changed, we think, when the world went digital and everything was run by software.  Less was expected of the operator, in part because operations became much more complex, but also (we think) just because less was expected.  The pressure-gauge was replaced by the idiot light.  And it became much easier to install a new alarm when you only needed a few more lines of code.  For the same reason that cameras and calculators sprouted multitudes of features almost no one actually used: they were there because it was easy to install them.

So now the decision on which alarms are installed is with the installer, not the operator.  And each team producing that bit of software or that feature of course feels its contribution is important and the operator should know about it.  We have degenerated to the point where our smartphone beeps to tell us there’s another message advertising stuff we have absolutely no interest in.  Many of the alarms can be turned off, of course, but that takes time and a long search through many menus, and as soon as the task is done the software gets upgraded and all must be done again.

So we are all being taught, willy-nilly, to ignore alarms.