Be Excellent To Each Other

My boss currently has a Cylon saying 'BY YOUR COMMAND' every time he gets a text. Cool the first couple of times, teeth-grindingly irritating now.

Also, someone has the background music to the newsreaders in Robocop as their ringtone somewhere over the other side of the room. At least it sounds like it to me.

There should be nothing that makes a noise of any kind in the office.

I normally leave mine on silent in teh office... as it is noisy enough in here

CLACK CLACK TAPPY TAP TAP CLICK CLACK

Keyboards are sort of a necessity.

Also, if you ever, EVER, leave your mobile phone on your desk and fuck off somewhere, and it rings (on non-silent, obv), everyone in the office should be allowed to line up to kick you in the head.

Someone else has a trance tune that means we all do chair-raving every time it rings.

I have two Portal quotes (the turrets saying "Hell-ooo?" and "are you still there?") as my SMS and email tones. But my phone is on silent in the office, always.

I used to have an IBM Model M keyboard in work -- that's the huge, heavyweight, ultra-clicky-clacky ones. It was mysteriously lost in an office move. I think my colleagues bribed facilities to throw it in a skip.

I've got the Metal Gear Solid codec signal (breep breep) noise when I get a text. My ringtone is just rings.

And my phone puts itself on silent when I'm in my office, unless it's a call from Mrs Grim... or the Grimlet's nursery.

Also:

OMG that's my cousin!

That's clever.. How does it do that?

Also.. Someone here has that blooming "Moves like Jagger" song as a ringtone. Annoying as fuck but not as annoying as the guy who has a compare the market Meerkat who shouts "Attention.. your phone is ringing... Attention.. Attention... Your phone is ringing"

Bring back the Crazy Frog I say!

Tell us more tales from the future, Hawkman!

I would have my phone on silent out of courtesy, we're not allowed to take mobile phones into the establishment anyway though, so mine just sits in my car and rings.

I work for a trading company and the folks on the dealing floor have to put up with a constant stream of samples and sound effects. A Mr Burns "Excellent" every time a deal is accepted. "Use the force, Luke" every time there's an order that's partially filled (or summat). They hear these samples thousands of times a day.

Suffice to say, I'd feel sorry for them were they not a bunch of boorish trader pricks.

Wholly agree on all non-silent mobile grumbles.

An app called Locale. It can do all sorts of things based on location, time, Bluetooth devices connected, etc. I'm not sure if it's locale that lets you whitelist calls when your phone is on silent or some other app I've got.

<chipmunk voice> INCOMING! *whoooosh* heheheh </chipmunk>

WARNING! WARNING! IT'S THE WIFE.

P!nk going 'Uhhhhhh' (really)

Darth Vader breathing

BRRRRMP BRRRMP BRRRRMP. BRRRRMP BRRRMP BRRRMP (oh look, cunt boss who has an office of his own has decided to sit on the spare desk to 'gel' with the 'team' and has left his fucking phone there to ring without him)

I go a step further - my phone has been on silent since I bought it. I've no idea what the ringtone is or what noise it makes for text messages; just the Android defaults I'd assume.

I did used to have Master of Puppets (Gljiva remix) and the 'message' voice sample from Supremacy for text messages, but I can't be arsed with all that now.

In my last job, my colleagues in IT had posh new IP phones and it was never quite the same once they found that they could upload samples to replace the ringtones.

I am tempted to ask the managers to order our lot to put their personal mobiles on silent.

And if they don't agree to it, I'll just have to un-silent my 'The Great Southern Trendkill' ringtone.

Err, and pay someone to ring me.

In memory of the great Mr Hitchens, his new 10 commandments seem apt here:

Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or their color.
Do not ever even think of using people as private property.
Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.
Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
Do not condemn people for their inborn nature. (“Why would God create so many homosexuals, only to torture and destroy them?”)
Be aware that you, too, are an animal, and dependent on the web of nature. Try to think and act accordingly.
Do not imagine you can avoid judgment if you rob people [by lying to them] rather than with a knife.
Turn off that fucking cell phone.
Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions and terrible sexual repression.
Reject any faith if their commandments contradict any of the above.

There is no good ring tone, though one that sounds a bit like a phone, or more or less anything played only just loud enough to get your attention I find acceptable.

I quite glad I don't seem to have the same personal issues with ringtones that most of you seem to have

Noise making fricking bastards!

Ahem. Well, yes. Commuting doesn't help, but your version of that is longer than mine, I'm sure, and I can at least have a break from it by cycling. So it's definitely one of my 'things'.

A ringtone killed my mother, you insensitive cunt!

I lived with a girl who used to use music to placate her two year old child. The only music she had was on her phone. She had one song. That blinking 'Adele' woman and that song with the blah di blah di blah 'someone like yooooooou' blah di blah... Gngh. So, she'd put that song on repeat until the kid went to sleep in the pram, then go shopping, leaving her phone (one of those Blackberry things) in the kitchen. I couldn't work how to shut the thing up, so one day after about an hour and a half at the end if my tether I wrapped it in blankets and put it in a large cooking pot in the cupboard and shut the kitchen door. So annoying.

Someone set up the bomb?

I've always found this (the former) interesting. Phones only sounded 'like a phone' partly because of technological limitations (I'm guessing), and to be as shrill and easy to hear as possible.

If the original phone manufacturers could have had Crazy Frog and the 24 thing as ringtones, I'm sure the option would have been there.

That may be true, and certainly there's no 'natural' phone noise that has evolved, but it's too late for me to change my programming now. And I find ordinary phones quite annoying anyway - more days than not I have my work phone on silent, too (as in, I switch the ringer off, rather than it being a whizzy phone).

Seems a little harsh on the two year old.

I've got an insensitive cunt, you mother!

I have my own office so don't have this problem. Cheerio.

Loner...

A loner who can log on for 10 minutes of quick Minecraft whenever he likes yep. Besides, company is overated, especially the company of your slackjawed work colleagues.

I've to go back a year to the last 'ringtoney' office. We had:

Portly avuncular middle aged guy with Summer of 69.
Girl with 2 children and a partner with 'issues' who had blah blah ooh la laa waa waa thing thing blah nanana romance.
Self consciously rock chick with Master of Puppets.
Chav girl with hi-nrg exercise rave bollocks
Lad in late twenties with zero cultural capital who had something recent by eminem.
Me, whose phone does a noise like a fucking telephone.

Office before that we had a switchboard system... and it was mandated that we must all have different ringtones. The girl next to me had one which went "Are you there? Are you there?". Awful.

I am not sure it's the tone itself as such, because almost everyone has some cuntishly self-regarding 'statement' ringtone these days. Which defines them as a person. Or something. It's more the frequency with which it was heard. Summer of 69 guy was mates with all the managers in the region and got a call every fifteen minutes or so through the day, so I'd hear 'jujujujujuju Got my first real 6 string jujujujujuju Hello, Dave speaking' upwards of 25 times a shift. Lady GaGa girl took a couple of calls an hour form partner, family, school, etc and towards the end of the afternoon Master of Puppets chick would have a good five or six calls. I can bear most music once or twice.

The thing is, you ask people why they've got such-and-such as their tone and they stroppily say 'because I like it'. That's moronic. "I like this song so I'm going to loop the first few bars of it intermittently throughout my working day". Anyone who feels that that's a credible way of enjoying music is subhuman and should be treated as such.

More importantly, why do some people take so many personal phone calls at work? If you need to take a personal call, fine. But when colleagues are on the phone to the same person they're going to see in a few hours anyway at roughly the same time each day, they can GTFF. Maybe you pick your partner up from a different place each day after work and need to know where it is tonight. Fine, they can text you, you can find out when you leave the office. I think it's these people's ringtones we get most annoyed at.



* I did briefly a few years ago, have the Tardis wheeze as my tone, muffled slightly by my phone case. I probably get a phone call every few days and keep my phone on my belt (which is apparently uncool, though I'm unsure why) so it was fun to see people looking round for a materialising Police box, which is genuinely what they do.

Oh, and my phone's ringtone has been the macgyver theme for about the last 8 years.

What makes you think you don't?

For a long time -- until iTunes lost it in an update and I didn't bother to fix it -- I had the Tank music from Left 4 Dead as both my ringtone and my alarm sound. It's hardwired into the nervous terror part of my cerebral cortex. It's particularly good for snapping awake.

Oh, except for my ex; she had a custom ringtone of the Witch music from L4D.

Now I just have one of the vanilla iPhone ones. Through laziness and analysis paralysis, not as a statement.

That's a genius idea. I'm all over that.

In fact, I am inspired...

Because of my ringtone selection process.

1: Install OS on phone
2: When phone eventually rings, decide if tone is a: hurting my perforated eardrum, as so many do or b: a ringtone for twats. You can tell this by listening to what it sounds like.
3: If either is the case, bring up the list and try the next one. Apply the same criteria until neither is the case.
4: Click 'ok'.



/edit You cunt, you've made me paranoid now, as I've no idea what my ringtone is.


Ah, it's pyxis on Android. Perfectly acceptable.

And you don't think that says anything about you?

Spit it out, chap...

L4D music for alarms and stuffs attached!

Nothing specific (and nothing bad), and IANAP, but I think deliberately "not" choosing a specific ringtone, and pointing that fact out, probably says quite a lot about how you want to be perceived - perhaps even more than someone who just chose a song because "it's their favourite". If you're making a concious decision to do something for a reason, then it's always going to "make a statement", as it were.

Well suffice it to say that even if I am a twat, no one is going to be able to guess that from my ringtone, they'll have to talk to me first.

I don't deliberately not choose a ringtone, I just have more interesting things to do with a phone than pick one when I re flash an OS, and eventually it is tea time and I don't get round to it until I take a call. I'm just talking about annoying ringtones today because there's an annoying ringtone thread.

That's a bit harsh on Angelman.

Nah, I didn't mean it to come across as a bad thing, but practically everything we do makes a statement about ourselves, especially ones carefully calculated to "not make a statement".

I'm the kind of person that never creeps around the witch. That probably says more about me than a ringtone.