Especially when we're talking about the silence of the appliances.
Glenn says,
My Bosch dishwasher beeps to tell you that the dishes are done. It then tells you, again and again, with five piercing beeps every five minutes, until you open the dishwasher and cycle the "power" button to the off position. Don't want this feature? Tough. There's no way to disable it, short of ripping it open and cutting the wires, something that has crossed my mind more than once. It must be one of those Teutonic discipline things: Ve haff vays of making you unload the dishes.
I had an electric dryer once (don't remember the brand, but it was a major manufacturer) that had no way to either turn off or turn down the "cycle finished" alarm -- which was a buzzer loud enough to be heard in the welding shop where I worked in the early '80s. While four guys were busy chipping out welds with air hammers. I'm sure leaving out a switch to control this saved the manufacturer all of a quarter or fifty cents.
Because I'm pretty good at working on electrical equipment, I got tired of this one day, opened up the back of the dryer, found the buzzer, and disconnected the fucker. And it is disconnected to this day as it sits in the condo we're trying to sell.
I never missed the damn thing, partly because that condo is so small that you can hear the dryer turn off anyway.
He's right about UPSes, too -- give me a switch to turn the damn buzzers off permanently. Or rig them so they beep once when they lose power (this could be important because you might not actually lose power, you might just experience enough of a voltage drop that the batteries kick in). I have five of them spread around the house and it's a pain in the ass to go around flipping the damn kill switch when we have a power failure.
[B]efore we even get to look and feel, the maxim should be "don't annoy the customer."
Amen. In fact, I think this is something blue and red staters can get together on. Maybe it will start the healing.
