Friday, January 10, 2014

Those Damned Annunciators

Jack Lemmon played the chief engineer of the troubled nuclear power plant in "The China Syndrome."  At one point everything has been going wrong for some time and he gets tired of listening to the warning bells and whistles.

"Somebody turn off those damned annunciators!"

I know how he felt.

Why, for instance, must a TV that you have just actually turned on, on purpose, standing right there, make a silly chimey sound when it finally gets through its start up procedure?  You just turned it on, and it is now lit up and ready to go.  Why make a further, quite unnecessary announcement of its status?

Same with computers.  You have just actually turned it on, with your own hands, sitting or standing right there.  Why does my iMac insist on generating a huge "bong" sound?  To be fair, if you leave it on mute when you shut it down the iMac will boot up silently.  With the TV, no such luck.

I'm sure that there are other examples, but I'm too angry to think about it. 

Good movie, by the way.  And how's this for a coincidence?  The movie came out in March, 1979, the very same month that the Three Mile Island nuclear plant almost melted down.  You can't buy publicity like that.  All that and Jane Fonda too.  

1 comment:

Bill Mlotok said...

We walked out of the theater to see the headline on the front page of the S.F. Chronicle. That was a "horror_sho" moment, as an old friend would have said.