I have a small car, and it has a dual-tank: gas and LPG, which is a great way to reduce my car-related budget, as LPG is way cheaper. Unfortunately, when the tank is starting to get depleted, the car will emit strident and loud beeps to notify me about it. And every single time time, it startles me like Hell, which isn't something I appreciate very much, especially when I'm steering a 1 ton metal box to overtake a trailer at 130km/h on the highway. To make things even double-plus-good, a full-screen "LPG tank almost depleted!" message will cover the whole dashboard. The very same dashboard that constantly have at its bottom the current level of said LPG tank.
The only time I want my car to maybe make some noise is when some critical shit is happening, like the oil level decreasing at an alarming rate. Having it yell at me that I'm only able to drive around 100 more kilometers on LPG, while I have a full gasoline tank affording me a total autonomy of like 1000 kilometres is anything but. I hate this, I hate that it's not configurable, I hate that it's waking everyone asleep in the car (especially toddlers), and I fucking hate that my car is actively lowering the safety of its passengers by scaring its driver. And of course, the notification will repeat a couple of times, at seemingly random intervals, likely because the complete bellend who designed this terrible scheme is taking the ever-lowering worldwide car-crash statistics as a personal affront, and is on a mission from God to fix this.
This major papercut made me think about how making noise for anything but the direst emergency should be an off-by-default privilege that only the user can explicitly grant, instead if being the default for all electricity-powered objects. I'm a CyberSecurity Professional™, earning a living breaking into computer and computer-adjacent systems, so I own the bare minimum in terms of Smart Devices™, and yet, yet I realised that I still have a non-zero amount of infernal noise-making crap.
For example, my washing machine has an obnoxious alarm when it completes a cycle, that can fortunately be disabled via a (hidden!) menu. Now, I get it, it might be useful to have some kind of alarm so that you don't forget your soaking clothes and have them rot into a new variant of whatever medieval disease. But, the alarm, while exceedingly loud, only lasts a handful of seconds, making it close to useless. Moreover, if you forget your laundry long enough for it to decay, you kind of deserve to have a Nurgle cult growing in your basement. Even assuming for the sake of the argument that this anti-feature could somehow be useful, this isn't the only yapping caused of this fiendish machine: the fucking "beep" happening every time one turns the knob or presses a button can't be deactivated. And don't you fucking dare talk to me about accessibility: all buttons are touch-sensitive, so useless to visual-impaired users, and all tones are exactly the same, making them absolutely useless for anything but waking up/startling the sleeping and unsuspecting house inhabitants. But this isn't everything, of course there is more: it has a "cute" tone when it starts, for no fucking reason at all. Why is this a thing? Who the fuck thought it would be a good idea? What's the reasoning behind this? It's a washing machine, there is no complicated fragile boot sequence, no hazardous warm-up shenanigans: I press the power-on button, it starts. Imagine having this ludicrous behaviour on all your objects: Opening your faucet? "DUDUDUDUUUUUUUU!" Unlocking your front-door? "LULULUUUUULULUUUUUU!" Turning on the cooktop hood? "LALALAAAAAAALAAAAAALAAAAA!" Maybe turning your lights on in your living room? The Ride of the Valkyries starts blasting at full volume.
As electricity is green-ish and cheap-ish where I'm living, I have the luxury of having a drier as well, forming an unholy honky duo with the washing machine: while it thankfully doesn't have a startup sound, the interaction-beep can't be disabled there as well, nor can the alarm. You know, the alarm telling me that my clothes are dry… There is no reasons, let alone urgency, that I should get any form of audio notification about this. I could spent 6 months in the hospital after a car crash because of the aforementioned LPG seven trumpets, come back to my place, and find my cloths still impeccably dry.
The kitchen isn't spared either: my hotplates will try their very best to make everyone deaf should something like a dishcloth, or perish the though, some water be present on more than two touch-sensitive buttons at once. I fail to conceptualize what the issue is here, and why this warrants all this racket: doing nothing would be perfectly acceptable. Heck, if something really has to be done for whatever regulation bullshit or whatnot, how about blinking the lights used to convey that the plates are hot? Or, if you really need to take action, just turn them off automatically. Really, anything but something that would shame a car alarm in every way.
But the very best, my complete favourite, "the world class, maybe even the world champion" (kudos if you know where this is coming from), is a fucking baby-phone that beeps when you turn it on. The use-case is "monitoring a sleeping child", and the loud beep tends to wake the aforementioned kid up. May the gormless cock-up who created this absolute potato of a device spend his entire life walking on legos.
Fortunately, everything isn't complete garbage in this world, and I even have a couple of examples at hand:
My dishwasher: no sound whatsoever, it simply opens up when it's done.
My fridge: should I improperly close its door, it'll emit some faint noise for like 30 seconds. It's a totally valid important notification, as nobody wants to burn electricity to cold the room while the food goes bad.
My ebook reader: it's physically unable to produce any sound.
The world is dire enough as it is without having me adding to my shopping criteria "does it shut the fuck up?" to an already long list. If you're designing objects, please take some time to test their notification mechanism near an asleep toddler and/or a sleep-deprived lunatic, instead of making piling more noisy interruptions to our already notification-saturated reality.