peeves. You may find your spouse’s way of using a knife cute when you first get together and god-awfully annoying after twenty years of marriage. The experience of annoyance is so subjective, so context dependent, that it’s hard to nail down. This may be why researchers don’t tend to think of annoyance as a separate emotion. “From my perspective, annoyance is mild anger,” says James Gross, a psychologist at Stanford University. “And there’s a huge literature on anger.” Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, warns, “You have to be careful to distinguish annoyance from aversion.” “It’s hard to distinguish annoyance from frustration,” says University of Florida psychologist Clive Wynne.
Emotions are sometimes plotted on a chart with positive/negative on one axis and arousal/calm on the other axis. “Annoyance would be arousal-negative. But it’s a subtle one, isn’t it?” asks Dr. Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist and the director of the Evolution and Human Adaptation Program at the University of Michigan. “It’s not quite rage. It’s not quite anger. It doesn’t fit real nicely on those valences.” Annoyance seems to be its own thing. It’s possible that defining annoyance is as difficult as Justice Potter Stewart found defining pornography to be: “I know it when I see it.” Knowing it when you see it, however, isn’t always good enough. In some lines of work, you need to be an expert in being annoying just to get through the day.
1. A Noise Annoys
Summer 2010 was a hot one for New York City. Spring came early, and once the warm weather set in, it didn’t lift for most of the summer. A heat wave in July brought temperatures to the triple digits for several days, in and around town. People were desperate for relief. Hydrants were hacked; hoses, uncoiled. Side streets became mini water parks. Pool admissions were up.
July 6 was the real scorcher. It reached 103 degrees that day—breaking an eight-year record. According to the
That was a busy day for the New York Fire Department’s Emergency Medical Service. It received 4,225 calls, about 30 percent more than usual, the
When you call 911 in New York City, you first talk to a call-receiving operator called a CRO. (There are a lot of annoying acronyms in emergency medicine.) The CRO is trained to ask a series of questions to determine whether the emergency requires medical attention. If it does, an emergency medical services (EMS) dispatcher—who is trained as an emergency medical technician (EMT)—gets conferenced into the call. The EMS dispatcher determines what level of response is required: the most serious calls—“segment 1s”—are choking, cardiac or respiratory arrest, and drowning. Segment 1s always get two paramedics, two EMTs, and a team of certified first responders (CFRs), plus the cops often show up.
The New York EMS is run by the Fire Department (FDNY). The FDNY is responsible for first-response care for more than seven million people over three hundred square miles of the New York metropolitan area. It responds to more than a million medical emergencies every year. At any given time, 250 ambulances are on the street. That number can seem even higher if your apartment has street-facing windows.
Will Tung is an FDNY paramedic in Brooklyn. He’s in his late twenties and is also the president of the Park Slope Volunteer Ambulance Corps (PSVAC), which is located in the basement of a narrow brick building on a tree- lined street on the fringe of downtown Brooklyn and the neighborhood of Park Slope. The PSVAC responded to more than five hundred emergencies last year—from direct phone calls or through calls from the FDNY in times of high call volume. With thirty-six active members, the corps is made up entirely of volunteers. It was started back in the early 1990s, when people were concerned about the lagging response times for EMS in the neighborhood. Someone is standing by on most nights. During the day, you get a voice message instructing you to call 911 if you’re looking for help.
In 2009, the average response time for FDNY EMS calls was eight minutes, twenty-seven seconds. In addition to choking and cardiac and respiratory arrests, the most serious calls included snakebites, asthma attacks, gunshots, stabbings, major burns, electrocution, and other traumas. The average response time for these calls was six minutes, forty-one seconds.
If you’ve ever driven in New York City, you know that getting anywhere in six minutes is a remarkable feat. It can take that long to get out of your parking spot, let alone across town. EMS vehicles, of course, are equipped with tools to help them part the automotive seas—namely, lights and sirens.
The original siren was part lady, part monster, and had a knack for luring men by means of irresistible song. The word has taken on new meaning since then—nowadays, most people would not say they’re irresistibly drawn to sirens.
Sirens are designed to be annoying. If they didn’t get your attention or you could tune them out, they would not be effective. If you find sirens irritating, just imagine what it’s like for people inside the siren-equipped vehicle. “Sirens are really annoying,” says Tung. “When you’re a pedestrian, it passes.” For everybody in the ambulance, it doesn’t go away. Tung generally keeps the windows rolled up to cut down on noise. When the windows are open and the siren is blasting, it’s hard to hear anything else.
Sirens are related to another particularly modern kind of annoyance: the intrusive electronic beeps and blips from appliances, computers, phones, and other devices on which we depend. As annoying (and useful) as many of those can be, no one is ever glad to hear an electronic beep that they can’t quite place.
Picture the scene: it’s Christmastime in a Detroit suburb. Christmas is a wonderful time of the year and also a supremely annoying time of year. Airports are choked. So are roads. Stores are full of desperate shoppers continually frustrated by the endless search for the perfect gift.
Yet if there are certain annoyances intrinsic to holidays, it takes a special kind of person to insert an additional annoyance on purpose. You can find such a person at the annual Christmas gathering at the home of Bob and Sue Johnson. The Johnson family really exists; we simply changed some names.
The house is a sprawling affair. There is a large, sunken dining room with a two-story ceiling. Even an eight- foot-tall Christmas tree sitting on a table is swallowed by the room’s vastness.
On the south wall, picture windows reveal a large yard, and because this is Michigan in the winter, the yard is usually obligingly covered with snow. The Johnsons’ three children and seven grandchildren do a pretty good job of occupying every corner of the house.
Uncle Ted takes Christmas very seriously, especially the assembling of Christmas stockings. Each year, he brings a bag of stocking stuffers. The bag contains candy, the latest squoosh ball, and the occasional key chain with a miniature Swiss Army knife or nameplate attached.
Ted is a bit of a gadget geek and usually finds some low-cost but high-tech toy to throw into the mix. For Christmas 2009, Ted introduced his extended family to what must be considered the perfect toy for this book: the Annoy-a-tron.
The Annoy-a-tron is made of a small piece of printed circuit board about the size of a quarter. In addition to the on-off switch, there is a small speaker and a magnet.
The Annoy-a-tron generates a short (but eponymously annoying) beep at random intervals every few minutes. Given its size and the short duration of the beep, figuring out where the noise is coming from is extremely difficult. Because the noise is soft, you’re not quite sure you heard it. Because the noise is random, you can’t predict when it will occur. So even if you become obsessed with finding the source, it will take an annoyingly long time to pinpoint it.
The Annoy-a-tron has the requisite ingredients to be annoying: it’s unpleasant, it’s unpredictable, and it leads you to falsely believe that it will end any second. It is especially ingenious because it’s only barely unpleasant. It’s not exactly cruel, although it’s so unpredictable and just beyond reach that it’s perfectly torturous.
For the Annoy-a-tron, you can choose between two different frequencies for the beep tone. According to the sales literature, the “2 kHz sound is generically annoying enough, but if you really, really want to aggravate somebody, select the 12 kHz sound. Trust us.” The higher frequency and the slight “electronic noise” built into that beep tone is really grating.
Now, Uncle Ted is a sweet guy. He’s patient and loving with his parents, generous with his nieces and
