It’s that familiar moment of panic in the office. You hear a phone ringing; and for a fraction of a moment you jolt, it’s your ringtone. However, just as soon as the first wave, a second wave of neurons fire. These ones much subtler in approach but still firmly telling you that no, it isn’t your phone that’s ringing. And the reason that you should know that is because you are presently holding said phone in your hand.
Rest assured that you are in good company.
Ringtones have had a weird life cycle. One that I’ve had the pleasure of seeing throughout its entirety. In the beginning the ringtone was just that, a ringing tone. Made by a bell on a bakelite house phone and so loud that one got the impression that it was designed to make children’s dreams of becoming firefighters that much more vivid. Fortunately I only caught the tail end of that era, one that was replaced with an inexpensive speaker bolted to a phone which would produce a sound not entirety dissimilar to a ringing bell upon receiving a phone call. Right around these time you could also get similarly monophonic warnings on contemporary cellphones, which eventually gave way to polyphonic tones once the accelerated progress of the early ’00s finally caught up with them. This is right along the time when people realized that they could make money selling ringtones.
Yes indeed for only entirely too much money you too could save yourself the pain of learning how to make a MIDI and just download it to your phone through a text message. Simply text MOO to 0000 and you can immediately make your phone sound like it’s dying. Also you give us your phone number so we can spam you all day and night and you get to pay for the privilege. To cancel your subscription simply print the form on our website (which we’re not giving you the address of) fill it in triplicate and send a copy of it and a self-addressed stamped envelope to…
Annoying when you had to help someone fill out the forms, even more so when phones began supporting .mp3 files by default and you could just crop the song. This one added a further layer of annoyance by simply rewarding the people that did the loudest most annoying fifteen seconds on a popular song thus guaranteeing that someone would use it for exactly that. And this is the world we lived in for a while. Filled with everyone getting their favorite song blared at them from a cheap speaker whenever they received a call whether we wanted to or not. This existed next to stupid fads such as backtones, wherein you could also pay for your phone carrier to spare your callers the agony of listening to the standard call tone and replace it with the agony of listening to Ke$ha.
But at some point we all kinda…stopped. And I’m not quite sure why. It’s one of those things that everyone agrees to do and then it suddenly and very quickly stops. Like wearing polyester pants or installing toolbars. And like with those, it’s not a complain but rather simple curiosity that compels me to ask why. My best guess is that between phone vibration motors finally became good enough at alerting people of things, people avoiding using their phones for actual phone calls as much as possible, and an overabundance of notifications has caused people to get burned out about the whole ringtone thing for much the same reason you shouldn’t actually use your favorite music to wake up in the morning. At least with talk radio you just keep hating talk radio.
Whatever the reason, we’ve swung far in the other direction, to the point where a not insignificant number of people never bother to change their ringtone and notification tones, much to the charging of everyone else in the office when it rings. If you’re amongst these, please let this article be encouragement to go in and change it. It doesn’t have to be a custom one, certainly don’t try and relive the past by putting in some early Soulja Boy. Anything else from the list will do. At the very least, you’ll halve the number of confused people per call.
Then again, it’s likely that you’re just keeping the phone on silent most of the time anyway.
