It Speaks Volumes

It only took my brother-in-law about five visits to my family's house for Sunday Dinner for him to realize that if he wanted any chance of being heard around the table he would simply have to talk louder than the people sitting on either side of him. He was not wrong. There is no denying that the members of my family all possess strong pipes and when we get together the volume can rise pretty quickly. However, I honestly do not believe this problem is exclusive to my gene pool. I think any time you get a large group of people together that have something to say to each other the noise level is bound to go up by a few decibel points and my family is simply an example of that. When you grow up with three siblings and want to get your parents' attention speaking the loudest is the easiest way to to achieve that goal (Fun fact: the more girls in the house the louder you have to be.), until eventually being quiet makes you appear to be guilty of something. Unfortunately this increased volume has this pesky habit of sticking around. (I'm working really hard to make sure the next generation grows up being a little bit quieter, but as of right now I am failing miserably.) The only thing I am comforted by is that soon enough we're going to be seen as a quiet bunch, because the world around us certainly isn't getting any quieter.

I arrived at my doctor's office the other morning to discover I was second in line to check-in. It shouldn't have been a big deal, only the woman in front of me wasn't content do simply let the receptionist know she had arrived, she wanted to tell her every gory detail which had lead her to come in that morning. What was a little crazy is that she didn't appear to have any shame about keeping her medical history a secret. She seemed almost proud to go over every procedure she had gone through, some of them rather personal. I was doing my best not to listen but when you don't have a smartphone there is only so much you can do to distract yourself from something taking place directly in front of you (if anyone wants to convince me to get a new cellphones, this situation is the way to do so). Even worse the woman had one of those voice which just cuts right through you and worms its way around your brain to the point you could be watching TV two rooms away and you would still hear her. I had just gotten the sound of her out of my head when I went to the gym this morning and found myself working out between a grunter on side and a loud counter on the other. Now, I'm never going to demand people keep their voices down in a public space because I have no right to do so. That being said, these two were driving me crazy. The counter was especially bad because she kept screwing me up. I'm counting in my head and her voice kept throwing me off. I probably did 15 extra reps of each machine. Not sure if I should thank her or not (how sore I am tomorrow will go a long way to determining this).

Personally, I blame television for this issue being so widespread. I'm constantly complaining about the "experts" the cable news channels are bringing on who attempt to make up for their lack of original opinions or useful knowledge of a situation with volume or who compensate for their shortcomings by yelling insults at one another. But, those channels are hardly alone in this because sports channels are just as guilty. No matter the sport pre-game shows have ever-expanding rosters to the point that you can have 10 people talking at the same time, all trying to make the same point and, much like at a crowded dinner table, figuring the only way to get credit for making that point first is to make it louder than everyone else. It is as if no one told them there was a microphone clipped to their shirt. Still, there is no denying the biggest culprit in all of this is cellphones. I think we all know how frustrating it was to be standing in the middle of a major metropolitan city and have the person on the other end of the line tell you that your phone was so bad they could barely hear you, meaning your only recourse was to start yelling. It happened so frequently that after a while I think we all just started yelling into the phone out of habit, even on landlines, so before too long that yelling had invaded our everyday lives. Even though reception has improved, that need to yell has remained constant. Just think, for all the wonderful things our phones can do these companies still can't make one that makes it easier to talk.

Now, because we have several suspects we can point to as the cause of all this extra noise you would think that would make it simple to correct them and begin to reverse the trend, but that is easier said than done. First off, phone companies have had 20 years to work on making better cellphone microphones and they don't appear to be in any great hurry. Instead, things like Blu-Tooth are getting smaller and further away from our mouths, which is only going to make it worse. Not that I can blame cellphone companies for this decision because people are doing way more texting than talking at this point, so they probably see putting a better microphone on a cellphone as being the equivalent of working on a way to make record players have better needles. And you know TV isn't going to start reducing the size of their panels because they remain convinced that eventually one of these talking heads is bound to make a good point and they will be damned if it happens on some other network. That means it is up to humanity to do it on our own and even if everyone tried their best it will still be years before our behavior starts to change. Even worse is that all this yelling is causing people to take drastic measures, like turning up their headphones to drown out the noise. That would be fine, only is is causing the next generation to go deaf at a young age, which means eventually they will need to start screaming to be heard so the cycle will continue. I guess all I can hope for in the future is that my gym starts putting more space between machines.