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This morning my fiance and I were startled awake at 5am by the sound of very loud beeping. The first time it went off I wasn’t sure if it was in my apartment, it actually happened or just a dream. About 15 minutes later it went off again, this time I knew it was in my apartment. I searched around and thought I figured it out, the smoke detectors batteries were low.

So at 5:08am I’m precariously setting up some chairs, the perils of having beautiful high ceilings, trying to reach the smoke alarms. I have three in my apartment. I found out two out of three had no batteries in them to begin with, a safety lesson learned. I took the batteries out of the other and went back to bed. 15 minutes later, the beeping went again. ugh!?

Was it a cellphone, timer, alarm clock, watch. Nope. Nope. Nope. While searching the beeping went off again, I finally determined it to be a conference telephone unit I had in my bag, since I was transporting it our SF office.

Now, why did the engineers at Polycom think that their conference phone was that important, that the battery dying on it required a very loud incessant beeping. Is that really that critical?

The same goes for my microwave, the engineers at Samsung gave my microwave the personality of total jerk. Heaven forbid you forget an item in there for a minute or two; he’ll let you know, beep. beep. “Hey asshole, you left something in here!” beep. beep.

My coffee maker can’t turn on without letting the world know with three loud beeps, “Stand back people! I’M about to make some coffee. Don’t worry, I’ll beep to let you know when I’m done.” Plus, the coffee maker can’t help but shout out a couple of extra beeps when you turn it off, beep. beep. “good-bye for now, but tomorrow morning I’ll be ready again.”