This Is Beeping Annoying

Today I was walking downtown, and I could hear the constant beeping of a large truck backing up.  I looked around for something along the lines of a dump truck, but I couldn't see any such truck, reversing or not.  The largest reversing vehicle was a parallel-parking SUV.  So I though maybe SUV's had finally gotten so big that they'd had to use the beep warning too.

But then I saw that it was actually a cherry picker at a building being demolished across the street.  It wasn't the occasional beeping of someone trying to manouver the machine either; it never stopped.  At first I assumed that the warning must go off not just when it's reversing, but also when someone is lowering the platform, to warn people underneath.  But no, the beep kept right on going even when it was totally motionless.

That's a pet-peeve of mine: overwarning.  If the beeping is going on all the time, people will just ignore it.  No one is going to look around (or up) when they hear it, because it will just be part of the background noise of the construction site.

It reminds me of a house I lived in during university.  It had a really sensitive smoke detector.  That sounds safe, but the problem was, it went off if you set the toaster too high.  Anything beyond my super-light-why-bother-toasting-it toast was pretty much guaranteed to set off the alarm.  We complained about this of course, but a house of male university students complaining that the smoke alarm goes off when they cook is not going to be taken seriously.  The sad part is, we were so used to cooking setting it off that our first reaction upon hearing the alarm was to open the windows to air the house out and hopefully stop the alarm.  But opening the windows is a bad idea in a real fire, since the fresh air will feed the flames.  So in this case, making the smoke detector more sensitive actually made it more dangerous.

I don't want to sound like an uncaring person who just doesn't want to be bothered; I do like the idea of alarms and want to be warned in a dangerous situation.  But we have to find a happy medium in which we don't dilute the meaning of warnings.