Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!

Devices that alarm us tend to attract a particularly intense spasm, even stream, of human invective.

A fridge that beeps reproach to warn us of an imperfectly closed door needn’t expect to be thanked. Neither should a neighbouring car alarm, even if just doing duty by its owner.

When startled we tend to react badly.

This is perhaps personified, if that’s the word, by the relationship between the stowaway Dr Smith and the ever-alarmist Robot in the 1960s TV series.

When its sensors detected an impending threat parts of its plastic headgear would light up, its mechanical arms would start flailing and it would warn its boy companion: ‘‘Danger! Danger Will Robinson!’’

The boy, we grant you, would uncomplainingly spring into action just as the space monster of the week would appear from behind a rock or out of thin air. But should the Robot agitate the cowardly Dr Smith the result would be quite different. An alliterative outpouring of memorable abuse.

‘‘You caterwauling clod! You blithering booby! You tarnished trumpet! You nickleplated nincompoop! You hopeless heap of tainted tin! You clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk!’’

All of which were mild alternatives to the utterances from the bedrooms of the nation, or parts of it anyway, when smartphones detonated into alarm mode in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

The emergency alerts, in some cases received three times in the space of 20 minutes, were enough not merely to rouse the sleepers, but to give many of them a jolt of adrenalin.

Whereas the Robot was at least a reliable reporter, the cellphones’ conniptions were unwarranted.

On finding that it was just a test (later to be confirmed as an accidentally transmitted one) the general public reaction seems not to have been one of unalloyed relief.

Some people went online to testify, in a way that even Dr Smith would never have countenanced, exactly what it was that had just been scared out of them. And how little they appreciated this turn of events.

Civil Defence has been apologetic and, wisely, hasn’t made too much of the fact that, should the need arise to rouse a slumbering nation, the efficiency of the upcoming new system had had a pretty good test run, inadvertent or not.

The system is to be launched later this year, automatically installed and enabled on new phones, and perhaps needing upgrades on older ones.

It doesn’t seem likely that Wednesday morning’s false alarm will desensitise sleepers to the extent that it becomes a ‘‘phone that cried wolf’’ problem. Clearly it is nothing if not attention-getting.