The Missus and I are not alone in having a dog who barks rabidly during thunderstorms. But alone or not, we do. She may be little, and her bark may be a mere yip! compared to the more conventional woof! of full-size hounds, but she is determined to scare the storm away.
(And you know what? You can’t argue with results. The storm always leaves.)
For the record, she also barks when dogs on TV bark, and she barks when doors slam on TV, and when she’s anxious for dinner, and when someone opens the front door from outside, and she barks when she’s happy and excited about a new toy or t,r,e,a,t being unwrapped.
Still, she was doing this new thing in the last couple of weeks which I couldn’t understand: she’d suddenly start barking for no reason. It was like her storm-barking: frantic, maddened you-better-stay-away-from-my-family barking.
I couldn’t understand it, that is, until the moment over the weekend when I just happened to— well, let me explain.
The Missus and I have new “smart” phones. I don’t know what The Missus is up to with hers, but by default, when my own phone rings it just rings. Oh, I’d done the obvious thing already — downloaded a ringtone, and aren’t I hot stuff for having figured that out?
But then my former boss was telling me about her phone, which is roughly the same model, and she asked if I’d gotten into customizing ringtones: really customizing them.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, “I set mine up to ring as usual whenever someone calls, and I’ve got a different ringtone for my Mama, and one for my sisters…”
That sounded (ha, no pun intended) pretty cool to me. So I did some research. And then took action.
Now, I haven’t gone as far yet as my ex-boss. But on a lark, I did set the phone up to play my downloaded ringtone whenever a call comes in… and to vibrate whenever an email arrived in the Inbox.
That was it, you see:
Notifications from Facebook: bzzzzzzz, BarkBarkBark!
Spam arriving: bzzzzz, BarkYipBark!
E-newsletter subscriptions: bzzzzz, YipYipYipYip!
In short, the dog was being driven slowly but unambiguously mad by the male human’s flaky experiments in telecommunications.
And all it took for the male human to figure it out was to move the phone from the coffee table to his hip pocket. And then, of course, to make a connection between the bzzzz! against the thigh and the YipYipYip! in the ear. We won’t discuss how long this last step took.
