I’m okay with appliance making cute little dings or buzzes but if they chime out a full song it creeps me right out. I’m gonna get the clothes out of the wash you don’t have to scream “Mary had a Little Lamb” at me.
Fun fact: back in the 90s, some motherboards would start playing “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” through the internal speaker if the CPU fan was failing. So if you started hearing that, that meant your computer was about to fry itself.
I miss those lil internal speakers, games sounded so fun when made up of variations of a high pitched beep.
They’re still there.
My mom gets a scam page on her browser like once a week. It jams full screen and she cant remember F10 or winkey to get it to where she can kill it (#retirees). So it’ll play “you have a virus. Call the number on the screen” through her internal speaker and USB headphones looping the same minute-long speech for days until she calls me to fix it.
I can only imagine.
My current dryer has an annoying tone for everything. Change mode? Gotta beep as you click passed each one! Oh, you wanna adjust the time and heat? We’ll make it chime with every increment instead of just when the button is pressed! Clothes done? Song of my people! Opened the door? Second verse!
Samsung? We got one used and it’s great for the drying part, but when I went to research how to change the “melody”, and I’m being generous here, to a chime or something else…nope. You get that, or silence. So we use silence and listen for the sound of it stopping. That song is terrible, and for there to be no options at all in a modern appliance…why was this a good idea on the drawing board?
I like that you don’t say it annoys you but that it creeps you out. Like the washing machine singing at you is somehow a hint that Skynet is beginning to activate.
I consciously know it’s not actually something to be scared of but for some fucking reason it just sounds like it’s trying to tell me something bad is happening? Something to bring up with people who are trained in decoding this shit, probably.
We have a German brand washing machine that makes an ear piercing beep when the wash is done and repeats doing this every minute for 15 minutes straight. It is the most annoying and attention-seeking appliance in the house.
When it was time to replace the dryer, we intentionally got an Asian model with a lovely little tune that’ll play exactly once. I’ll never get tired of hearing that tune, because that god awful washing machine will always remind me of the alternative.
My washing machine has this repeating beep too. If you haven’t done so, check the manual: on mine there’s a setting to disable it.
Thank you so much for that suggestion!
It was right there in the manual, I really am an idiot sometimes. The beeping is softer now. It’s still super shrill and repeating, but at least it doesn’t give me an heart attack :)
I can’t disable it entirely, there’s too much washing going on to just ignore it completely. But this definitely helps!
My hot water boiler / warmer loudly plays Fur Elise for 10 or more seconds after it has brought a fresh tank to boil. Most of the time I don’t care, but at 6:30 in the morning its loud I worry about waking people even with closed doors.
Hold the unlock button for for 3 seconds and it will change the song to 3 beeps. Do it again to mute it.
Shoot some Great Stuff into the speaker hole. (Not really, no, don’t do this with something that heats up).
You could open it up, find the little speaker (probably a tiny little thing) and disconnect it or put some glue in it (like Goop).