Please Stop Beeping

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published August 10, 2026] ©2026

I’m trying to decide when our lives became controlled by beeps. When I was growing up, I don’t remember anything that beeped. Now I can’t think of anything that doesn’t. I’m frankly feeling over-alerted. 

An all-too-popular game in our home between my husband and me is: Name That Beep.  Is it coming from inside the house?  Or is it a trash truck or city vehicle backing up outside?  If it’s inside, did somebody (he knows who he is) forget their coffee cup in the microwave?  Or did I set a timer on the stove for some reason? And, of course, that’s becoming part of the problem.  What reason? Not only figuring out which appliance is beeping, or, if it’s the oven timer, but why I set it in the first place. 

If you’ve got a Smart phone, you know the difference between the email message beep and the text message beep and the “loved your text message reply” beep.  My computer alerts me to new emails as well.

When my husband Olof does the dishes and wipes the digital panel on our stove, it will often start beeping. As an engineer (and, more to the point, a guy), he isn’t about to admit that he has no idea why. While smashing it with a hammer after it had been going off for a half hour seems like a perfectly sane option, he will finally wander into the bedroom and announce, “There’s an incoming message from the Planet Klingon.  I think it’s for you.” 

This range, I should mention, was the only one west of the Mississippi that would fit into our space when our former KitchenAid range crumped during the pandemic.  One of its many negative features is that it is really easy to knock into the burner control knobs when cleaning up after dinner dispersing gas into the air for an entire night.  After the first time that this happened, I invested in a gas detection meter which mysteriously goes off on occasion even when we are just cooking something on low heat on the stove.  Probably unwisely, we’ve learned to ignore it.

Fortunately, our carbon monoxide sensor is much better behaved.  And we would definitely not ignore it.

An increasingly common beep is the low battery signal on the handset of our ancient answering machine. Definitely time to get rid of that thing.

We’ve had to replace most of our appliances in the last five years, and frankly, are not impressed with the alert features that seem to be standard now.  Our refrigerator beeps if the door is left open more than a minute while you’re unloading groceries into it.  Somehow, I managed to go 23 years with the last fridge without that feature and never leave the door open even once.

Our new microwave, alas, just won’t shut up.  It will beep into the next millennium until you remove whatever it was you put into it.  It will not be ignored.

Despite the fact that I have tried to disable as many beeps as possible, I have still managed to add a few.  After the fires in January 2025, my granddaughter, whose LA home came perilously close to burning down, installed Watch Duty on my phone which I think informs me of fires even in Los Angeles.  It goes off multiple times per day. Fortunately, it’s a distinctive sound so I can ignore it with, “OK, just a fire.” 

I feel bad about it, but I’ve disabled the Amber Alert from my phone.  That alert scares the bejesus out of me.  Could they turn that thing down a few hundred decibels?

I also signed up for the Shake Alert which alleges to give one 20 seconds notice of a quake with a magnitude of 4 or greater.  What’s confusing is that we already have this in the form of our aviary birds who give us pretty much the same amount of warning.  Of course, with them, you’re never sure it’s not just a hawk. 

My car beeps when the door isn’t shut tight and seat belts aren’t fastened. One beep I actually don’t mind is the after-market backup sensors I had installed on my 2005 Corolla that beep at me when people with a clear death wish walk behind my car at Gelsons as I am backing up.

There are two beeps that make me truly crazy. One is the beep that your ceiling smoke detectors make when the batteries are running low. Smoke detectors have been scientifically programmed so that those batteries only start failing at 3 a.m. It’s like the faucet drip torture only ten times worse. You want to stand underneath it and scream, “Stop it!  Stop it RIGHT NOW! I’ll get the ladder and change your battery in the morning!” But no, it maliciously beeps on.

To make matters worse, our hallway smoke detector can even be set off by steam from the shower in the adjacent bathroom.  It is disconcerting that it can’t tell the difference between fire and water.

Have we become a country of people who cannot remember anything if it doesn’t beep at us?  Um, yup!  How did we ever survive before? One answer: we obviously didn’t used to have so many gadgets.

Fortunately, some appliances will let you disable the beep alerts. But more often than not, you need an engineering degree and/or a soldering iron. YouTube abounds with videos on this topic.

Should we be relying on beeps less, just to make those ever-aging synapses keep firing? When you look at all those mental gymnastics exercises advocated for older folks, maybe going beeperless should be one of them.  Well, except maybe the ones like smoke alarms that would prevent the house from burning down. 

In the average kitchen, the beeping options are pretty much endless. With so many appliances beeping, will new ones have to start announcing themselves, like “coffee’s ready”?

I hope not. Bad enough that they’re all beeping at me. When they start talking to me, I’m done.  Because I fear I’d start answering.

 

Library Math 101: When You're Too Old To Ever Get Your Book On The Holds Queue

[“Let Inga Tell You”, La Jolla Light, published August 3, 2026] 2026

Ever since I retired, the La Jolla Public Library has become my second home. My library reserve queue is always maxed out and I generally read three books a week. The front seat of my car has library books being transported to and from the library pretty much at all times. 

Being able to read so many books is definitely a corrective emotional experience from my twelve years as a divorced working mom when I read exactly no books a year. I mean, zee-ro. I didn’t even bother with a library card since they unreasonably wouldn’t let you keep a book out for a decade. There used to be library fines and mine would have looked like the defense budget.

My engineer husband Olof reads both e-books and physical books. He likes novels on his e-reader but thinks the graphics are better in those massive 1,200-page techno-tomes he inexplicably considers pleasure reading. As for me, I just like the tactile feel of an actual book in my lap, the soothing susurrus when you turn the pages. 

I have seen first-hand that I am not the only physical book aficionado out there.  Never was this illustrated more obviously than on March 14, 2020 when the Covid epidemic hit and the library announced it would be closing the next day until further notice.  The Riford library on Draper looked like a literary Luddite Fall of Saigon. The librarians were frantically dispensing plastic grocery bags and allowing patrons to check out up to 40 books although I don’t think anyone was actually counting.  Like everyone else, I was dumping books wholesale into my bags according to two criteria: (1) it had a cover and (2) there were words inside.  

One would think that the lack of availability of physical books for so many months in 2020 would have inspired some of us to embrace technology.  But you would be wrong.   Covid generated a new DSM-5 category: People Who Will Just Not Use E-Readers No Matter What.  (There is no vaccine for this.) 

From time to time, we techno-hostile people actually prevail.  Olof and I like to sit outside on summer evenings and read, he on his iPad or e-reader, and me with a library book.  Not infrequently, Olof will have to go in early because the iPad’s low battery sensor is flashing. I try to look sympathetic but it’s all I can do to stifle a snicker.  I never have to worry about the battery on my library book getting too low. 

Now that I’m able to read so much, I’ve had to engage in Library Math.  As in, do I have the life expectancy to get some of the books I want given the number of holds versus the number of copies?  There’s some serious competition out there for the best sellers.

For every book I have on hold, I have 13 days to pick it up after my hold number comes up, then 30 days to read it.  If others are waiting for it, there are no renewals.  So I have to allow that each person in the hold queue ahead of me could take 43 days.

Now, one hopes that they will pick it up sooner and read it faster, and therefore return it faster.  But they might have been on vacation when the book became available.  Or they might not even have returned it after the 30 days.  Now that there are no more library fines there are actually evil low-life reprobates who keep them past due even knowing there are people with limited life expectancy who might be waiting. 

The other skewing factor is “transit time.”  I find that even after my queue number has come up, it can easily take two weeks for the book to actually arrive on the Holds shelf at the La Jolla Library with my name on it. I’m guessing this is a budget cuts issue. This could easily add 14 days to the potential 43 days, or 57 days per hold. 

But removing the transit time from the equation for simplicity’s sake, when I recently put a hold on a best seller I really wanted to read, there were 1211 holds ahead of me on 12 copies.  Those 1211 holds x 43 days per hold came to 52,073 hold days divided by 12 copies which came to 4339 hold days or… 11.8 years. 

This brings up two moot points, the first of which is that holds are only good for one year after which they are cancelled. (The other is that I’ll likely be dead.)

I queried one of the librarians about how rigid the one year hold time is. Will the library computer system automatically cancel a hold after that time as their site says? This person said that they usually recommend that if a person thinks they want to read a certain book, they get on the hold list early. So no definitive answer there.

The library does seem, in their defense, to buy more copies of the most popular books.

But this doesn’t always solve the problem.  Another book I wanted had 1335 holds but given its popularity, the library now had 108 copies.  But 1335 x 43 comes to 57,405 hold days (not even factoring in that pesky transit time) and even divided by 108 copies still comes to 532 days or more than the maximum one year allowable hold time.

E-books are not unlimited but do seem a little faster.  One of the books I wanted had 375 e-book holds x 43 days per holder came out to 16,125.  One of those 58 copies would come up by day 278.  If, of course, I was willing to read e-books. 

So increasingly, I’m finding myself calculating:  do I have a reasonable life expectancy to get a particular book?

If not, maybe it’s time to just buy the damn book then donate it to the library after I’ve read it, increasing the number of available copies for my fellow anti-e-book Luddite compatriots?  I’m hoping they’ll actually put it in circulation.  

On more than a few occasions lately, I’ve done just that. Not only do I get the book a lot sooner, but I consider it my contribution to the local tree-killing physical book community.  (You’re welcome.)