Addendum to “the thing that goes beep”

For close to six months (slightly embarrassing ー_ー﹡) we tried in vain to locate an intermittently beeping thing in our apartment. While packing up the house to move to Vancouver, we finally found it (a *huge* relief, let me tell you as I wasn’t looking forward to explaining the unknown beep to prospective buyers).

It turned out that the thing, was in fact four separate thermostats…each in a different room, two on one floor, and two on another, that had each run low in power at a slightly different date and time over the space of a week. It retrospect, this totally made sense, and explained why the beeps often sounded as if they were coming from different places (but due to the layout of the apartment, could also easily seem like the echoes of one single thing).

The thermostats were a good six years old so one can only hope that, thanks to Moore’s Law and a better awareness of design, we’ve seen the last of this particular scenario. Then again, as we only have so much of a palette of beeps, vibrations, gestures, visual cues and miscellaneous personalised affordances to play with — these problems may go on for a tad longer :-)

“Did I hear the washing machine beep?” asks my wife.

“I thought it was the dishwasher,” I respond, scurrying from kitchen to laundry room and back again, trying to figure out which it was.

“Oh, it’s the timer on the microwave oven. I forgot that I had set it to remind me when I had to make that phone call.”

— The Design ofFuture Things by Don Norman