Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for July 08, 2018

It is confusing sometimes.

What I hate is radio commercials with car horns. Not good when I’m on the road myself, suddenly looking around for who’s got a problem out there.

I don’t bother with message notifications. I’m off Twitter and FB; never been on IM apps. My ringtone is “Who let the dogs out”! No mistaking that!

Grannies Nationwide: “Do not call me when my Stories are on TV!”.

I hate the doorbells! I have a very soft doorbell and every time they use electronic door bell – regular style, I have to figure out if it’s mine or the TV’s. Phones calls are sometimes bad, too.

I was in the store and everybody’s phone was going off with an AMBER alert.

Call me crazy, but when I’m home, unless I’m expecting a call I leave my phone in the bedroom.

Sometimes, I even… (gasp!!!)… turn if OFF!

Stay calm folks. It’ll wait. If it was important they’ll call/text/tweet again.

I find it annoying how people can be sitting in the room talking to you and texting on their phone without saying excuse me a minute I need to answer this – so RUDE, or answer their phone without saying excuse me, I need to take this call, and unless you are expecting an important call, or it’s family you are unlikely to catch later on, then let it go to voicemail. And phones going off in restaurants UGH again unless expecting a very important call, let it go to voicemail and don’t leave your phone turned on, put it on vibrate so you know a call is coming not the entire restaurant. Some people have very poor phone manners

They look older as young people than they do today.

The new problem is TV commercials that call for Alexa to order their product. I heard one recently said it twice during their 30-seconds. I don’t have an Alexa so I don’t know if it actually would, but that would be annoying.

The one time that I did not have my cell phone with me was Sept. 18, 2007. I left it in my car so that some work I was doing wouldn’t damage it. When I returned to my car for something, I saw that my wife had called me repeatedly. My dad had had a severe stroke. I made it to the hospital with only minutes to spare before he passed. I’m not sure that he knew me.

I still think about the 45 minutes that I lost.

I have one but I tell people I don’t. Three people have the number – Hubby, Eldest Daughter, and my best friend. If the call isn’t from them, I don’t answer it.

I really should learn what all my phone’s tones mean…

My flip phone is set to ring actual phone ring..how old fashioned. I do not text or receive texts. Some one wants to call me, do just that or leave a message.

My dogs go nuts when the Home Advisor commercial is on TV, because of the very loud doorbell.

Several months ago, I got a replacement Tracfone for one that would no longer pick up a signal. It occasionally puts up little notification icons and I have to go to the manual to see what they mean. However, some of them aren’t in the manual. I managed to decode a couple by Google searching, but there is still one I haven’t figured out, but I haven’t gotten it for some time, so… meh… ☺

My house is always beep, dinging, buzzing. I don’t answer my phone at home unless I recognize a voice on the message machine.

On my cell phone, I coded the ringtones for specific categories of contacts, so I know whether to answer or to let it go to voice mail. A call from family plays one song; from friends, a different song; from the doctor/dentist/vet – the theme from the Walking Dead; from work – the theme from Game of Thrones. There are more categories, but you get the idea. My default ringtone (any number that is not in my contact list) – Pachelbel’s Canon in D. I figure I should enjoy the music while I ignore the call!

Be in a crowd when a phone starts ringing and half the people reach for it thinking that its their phone because, just like the old VCRs where we never learned how to set the clock, we don’t know how to individualize the ring tones on our smart phones

Geez…This writer Johnson needs some Prozac or a good therapist…the last few months he’s moped through the week…. Get to a bar in the Keys for a few weeks,brighten up baby…

My issue is when they mention Alexa on the radio or tv and she feels obliged to yell out some response.

Hmmm. I guess couches didn’t wax or man-scape in the 70s either.

For ten years around the 1990s I worked in a room full of all sorts of fancy equipment and a lot of it had “sonalerts” – like electronic whistles – to report trouble. The high pitched sounds were incredibly difficult to locate, especially when they just beeped a few times every few minutes. We would stand in one place, sometimes taking more than an hour or even more than a day, to find the source.

Solution: Arlo change all your smart phone alert sounds to Cheech and Chong movie quotes. Janis’ to quotes from the movie Clueless. Incomming calls would go something like: Arlo’s phone: “Fire it up homes!” Janis’: “As if!”

Different tones for different alerts work for me. I just set the ones I don’t care about to be silent.

I’m obviously among friends: I don’t carry my flip phone, unless I leave the house, I don’t answer it unless it’s convenient and I don’t return unknown number calls. We DO answer unknown numbers at home because my wife and I are on the call lists for a couple groups and I love to mess with scammers. But we don’t return unknown number calls there either.