Beep Beep!

The coyote hears "Beep! Beep!" and he's off to chase the roadrunner. His hunger, much like Pavlov's dog, is triggered by a sound. So too is our world controlled. It was simple at first. We awoke to the sound of an alarm clock. We waited for the sound of the beep for the answering machine to record our message.The novelty of quick cooking created the microwave whose beeps alerted us to the finished food. From there, we moved on to car alarms which honked or should I say beeped the car's horn to alert us that someone was too close to our vehicle. Pagers and cell phones were next on the scene; Convenient devices which control us with the sound of a beep. Beeping, incessantly loud beep, beep beeps surround our lives on a daily basis.

Not only are we inundated by this sound but we are controlled by, slaves to and victims of it as well. How many times have you caught yourself hearing a beep and wondering if it was you? How many times have you said "Was that my phone or yours?", during the course of a conversation? How many times has a car door being opened by the remote triggered you to check your phone? How many times have you ignored the person with you to check the mechanical device beeping at you just to see who it was and if a message or text was left? How many times have you shushed a clerk, waiter, waitress or other service person doing his or her job so that you could answer the call of the beep (ring or other tone for that matter)? We are all guilty of doing all of the above to some degree. There are individuals more guilty than others but for the most part we are all now giant experiments trained to respond to a beep.

We lived without the beeps for years. We answered calls and others received a busy signal. If it was really important an operator would actually break through.  We now are oddly aware of little noises signalling an incoming message. We jump to our phones like good little doggies. We hear car doors and automatically check our purses, packs and pockets to see if it was for us. Now we are all trained that the sound of the beep must be instantly answered and the flesh and blood individual with us is somehow less important than whoever sent a text, left a message or called.

Like every interesting science fiction film we must learn to break our programming. We must return to a world where people and manners matter. We must learn that whomever we intentionally chose to be with that day has priority over the caller at the end of the beep. We must remember that the person waiting on us, behind the counter or helping us in any form is the correct individual to engage in conversation and not the mechanical device attached by blue tooth or other means to our body. Keep in mind, the coyote was often hurt along the path of following the beep. He never learned. We can change our story. Beep, Beep!