RINGING IN THE NEW YEAR

‘BEEP RAGE’ BRINGS ROB INGRAM TO BOILING POINT — OR IS THAT THE JUG?

SO, 2019 ALREADY. For those of you into the Chinese Zodiac calendar, it’s the Year of the Pig. For those of you into the AFL Zodiac calendar, it’ll be the Year of the Eagles again. And for those of you hoping for some sign of human evolution, I’m afraid it will probably be the Year of Artificial Intelligence… if any sort of intelligence at all. In 1976, Al Stewart recorded Year of the Cat. In 1978, Christopher Koch published The Year of Living Dangerously. The United Nations has declared 2019 to be the International Year of Indigenous Languages. But I fear it will be known as something much more annoying — the Year of the Beep. We’ve been ambling around the planet, dragging our knuckles, for maybe four million years. For about 100,000 of those years we’ve been developing cultural diversity. For a bit over 100 years we’ve focused on advanced technology. And this century we’ve entered the Digital Age. What is the end result of this extraordinary evolution? The beep. The beep now controls our lives. Out here in the bush, we rise early because we went to bed early for lack of nightlife or intelligent television. No red carpet premieres out here. The rooster used to crow at the break of dawn and we’d be out of bed to thaw the pipes to make a cup of coffee. Now we’re woken by the incessant beeping of the alarm clock. The pump beeps when the power reaches the control box and the jug beeps three times when the water boils. The digital cordless phone beeps when it needs to be replaced on the charger. And when you replace it, it beeps twice. Our old microwave used to beep three times when the pre-selected time was up. It beeped just once to acknowledge that you’d pre-selected a time. The new microwave — to remind us that it is an advanced model — beeps five times. I rush to the bedroom to switch off the alarm clock, but it’s switched off. Must have been the jug, so I pour the water into the cup with the instant coffee. The coffee’s cold. It was the smoke alarm warning me the battery is low. Or perhaps the phone to let me know of a new message. Or the dishwasher. “I knew it would come to this,” I called to The Chosen One. “This idiot on the television is talking entirely in beeps.” “I think you’ll find,” she said, “that the network is beeping out his profanity.” “How can the same electronic signal tell us about that idiot’s profanity and that the jug has boiled?” I demanded. So how do you escape the chirping tinnitus of the invasive household beep? I took off in the car just to get away from it all. The first beep told me that my seatbelt wasn’t fastened. The second, that the cruise control was on. I stopped for a reversing lorry. It beeped its way back down the laneway. The petrol gauge beeped when the light came on. I pulled into a petrol station. It said BP. Is it because men come from Mars and women from Venus that women seem immune to beep rage? “Best you get over it,” TCO advised. “Change is inevitable.” “Anyone who thinks change is inevitable hasn’t used the vending machine down at the club,” I said, and that was probably my one triumph of the day. But the mention of Mars and Venus leads me to the hidden dangers of the electronic beep. I read recently about an incident at the Parkes radio telescope, which receives incoming electromagnetic radio waves from our galaxy and other universes, and has discovered half of more than 2000 known pulsars, vital to our knowledge of astrophysics. Parkes researchers were puzzled by beeping radiation signals that they could not identify until they traced them to the microwave used for heating pies in the staff refreshment room. Did Neil Armstrong really walk on the moon? Are we being told the truth about the search for alien life? Or does The Dish at Parkes need a new battery in the smoke alarm? Whatever — welcome to the Year of the Beep.

WHAT IS THE END RESULT OF THIS EXTRAORDINARY EVOLUTION? THE BEEP.