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Tuesday, May 24, 2005The Tuesday Twat(s)No 18. Ringtone users.OK, No apologies whatsoever if you are one of those twats who download ringtones for your mobile phone. It's not big, it's not clever and it says nothing about your individuality. These have to be one of the most irritating and obnoxious "inventions" in recent years. I don't have a problem with the concept of different ringtones for different phones. We are petitioning in work for them to let us change the ringtones on our office phones - at the moment it is impossible to figure out whose phone is ringing when you are eating your lunch, meaning that you invariably get up for "your" phone, only to find it's someone else's. Very irritating when you almost have 10 down in the crossword and you lose your train of thought. However, I am of the rather old-fashioned opinion that a ringtone should "ring". It should not play the national anthem, the first four bars of "The A-Team", "Angel" or quack loudly. In fact, such is the cacophony of weird and (not so) wonderful noises at work, that I have set my own mobile to sound like - a phone. Seriously. If you hear a good old fashioned "Ring Ring" - it's for me. I fooled myself some years ago into believing that once the technology moved on from "beeps" to polyphonic and MP3 ringtones, it would be less annoying. Is it bollocks. It's even more irritating. There you are, sitting at the computer trying to understand the garbled English that constitutes the abstract of a paper in the Journal of Biology, and fucking Blur Song 2 suddenly belts out beside you at an implausibly high volume. And why do people always look so embarrassed at their choice of ring tone? Sure, your mobile phone going off in lab meeting is always slightly embarrassing - but a discrete "ring ring" rarely elicits more than a sympathetic smile from your colleagues - whereas the theme music to "KnightRider" results in loud guffaws and quietly muttered "fuckwit"s. What the fuck where you thinking? That it would get less embarrassing over time? And whilst we are on the subject- women should not be allowed to own mobile phones. This is not some Taliban-esque call for religious propriety - just to prove my credentials I believe strongly in immodest clothing - but a simple request for a quieter life. You see the problem with women is they don't believe in pockets. Whereas blokes cheerfully stuff their jeans with wallets, keys, loose-change, mobile phones, matches, paperclips, swipecard and whatever toy fell out of the breakfast cereal that morning - women might slip their locker key in. Possibly. This means that their mobile phone is left sitting on their desk (why more aren't stolen I don't know) or, even worse, inside their locker. And of course they MUST be left switched on. I have tried to persuade my female colleagues that if they were to put them in their trouser pockets the added width to their hips would make them more sexually attractive in a Darwinian sense. But I was told to "fuck off". So it was with mixed feelings that I read that software has been developed to allow you to sample any song and convert it from CD to ringtone for free. On the one hand the suffering will increase - on the other hand a multi-million pound business will collapse overnight. Good. Edit: Un-fucking-believable! The "Crazy Frog Ringtone" is set to be this week's official Number 1, now that downloads are counted in the Top 40 countdown. Seriously! Apparently it is outselling Coldplay's latest release (BBC Online). Ooohh I bet Chris Martin is pissed... Labels: The Tuesday Twat(s) |
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