(Richard Foreman/WARNER BROS. PICTURES) - For now, our appliances just beep. But soon they’ll be saying, “Hasta la vista, baby.”
When the machines become sentient — and, believe me, they will; I’m convinced “Terminator” was a documentary — perhaps we will look back at this column as a last hurrah in the face of the robot onslaught.
I heard from many readers after my Monday column on poor appliance design. Jim Ashley of Dunn Loring thought it was amusing that I compared my tippy, German-made iron to a Porsche. Porsches are great, he wrote. Their keys? Not so much.
“There are electronic buttons on the key to unlock the door, the front trunk and the back trunk (there is, apparently, no motor in the car, just two trunks where a motor might be),” Jim wrote. “However, the buttons are so sensitive that every time you touch the key, one of the trunks unlocks. This often happens after you’re already in the car and have to alight (learned that word from Metro last week) to shut the trunk before heading out.”
Perhaps a warning beep would help? That ubiquitous beep bugs many of you.
Burke’s Jack Law said his household cordless telephone has a feature to help you find a lost handset: Push a button on the base unit and the handset beeps.
“Awesome, right?” wrote Jack. “The problem is, there’s a beeper on the base unit also, and it beeps. . . . If the handset is under a sofa cushion, on another floor, or inside the dog (none of which are out of the question at my house), there’s no way to hear its timid little beep over the tsunami warning coming from the base unit.”
Arlington’s Chris Coughlin is at war with his Whirlpool microwave, which beeps at the end of every task. “My relationship with the appliance has degenerated into regular, pseudo-spousal arguments,” Chris wrote.
Beep. “Okay, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Beep. “Can’t you see I’m slicing the meat?”
Beep. “Okay, now you’re just trying to be annoying.”
Beep.
Chris said that when he got his new iPhone, he specifically requested that Siri not be included. “The last thing I need is another appliance telling me what to do.”
Doug Burke of Annapolis actually wishes some things would beep more often. “When the power goes out, everything beeps,” he wrote. “The smoke detectors (we have seven, per code), the printers, the fax, the Verizon Fios battery backup. I hear a beep down the hall and have to stand for a minute and listen, eliminating rooms, holding the flashlight and moving slowly ever closer to the source of the beep in 60-second intervals to turn the thing off or remove and replace a low smoke detector battery. Over the years I’ve gotten better at finding the source, but a beep every 15 seconds in this situation would be great.”
Harold Coddington of Annandale agrees it’s weird that my dishwasher beeps when the door is open, but he thinks refrigerators and freezers should do that instead. “My family has a bad habit of leaving the doors ajar,” he wrote. “I wonder how many other people have the same problem?”
A reader named Lee from Burke explained why our dishwasher beeps. “Evidently you live in an older house and have not had the kitchen totally remodeled,” he guessed, correctly.
Older kitchens had counters with heights of 34 inches. New dishwashers are set for a 35- or 36-inch-high counter. The only unit that would fit in our house is what’s called an ADA-compliant dishwasher. ADA, as in Americans With Disabilities Act. “ADA-compliant dishwashers will fit because they are smaller so the controls can be lower,” Lee wrote. “The beeping is for the blind or people with vision problems to alert them that the dishwasher door is open so they don’t fall over it. And the final closing beep is for them to know it’s closed and will now run.”
Herndon’s Dan Carney has a way of avoiding the beeps: He buys some of his appliances from eBay. “You can get classic old appliances that work as expected,” he wrote. “Sometimes you can even find new ones, still in their boxes, as was the case with our classic black Ma Bell-era kitchen wall phone that I bought new-in-box about three years ago. Some visiting kids don’t know how to operate it, however.”
That sounds like a plus to me.
Finally, in Monday’s column I misidentified my tippy iron. It is a Rowenta Master, not a Rowenta Classic. I got it confused with our new espresso machine, which is called the Classic — and which, thankfully, doesn’t beep.
To read John Kelly’s previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.
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