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I don’t want to be an old man shouting at the clouds, but pretty much everyone is annoying these days, and no one has any common sense, good manners, or common courtesy. It’s been that way for centuries, and it’s one of the reasons I never leave my house. You’re all acting like animals!
One of the most annoying of these violations is people’s cell phone habits a recent Reddit thread shows how much one in particular drives a lot of people crazy.
A man on Reddit criticized people who turned on their cell phone typing sounds.
Why? WHY?! Why are some of you doing this?! As the Redditor put it in his post, “tack, tack, tack, tack… that’s all I hear behind my head while someone behind me is typing a dictionary answer.”
He’s talking about the sounds your phone makes when you type text messages – those incredibly raspy, very ordinary little taps that are turned on by default when you buy a phone, but couldn’t be more easily turned off.
Personally, I never understood this. It’s like people don’t change the batteries in their smoke detector and just sit there and tolerate it while it beeps shrillly every 30 seconds. Don’t you hear that?! Aren’t you ready to burn yourself alive with annoyance?! What’s wrong with you?!
It looks like I’m not the only one. The Redditor said it regularly disrupts his work, especially when he’s trying to get rid of “detail-oriented Excel sheets” and other tedious work. Although his assessment of what is behind this habit seemed strange to many, almost everyone agreed it was annoying.
The man called this bad cell phone habit “elitist” and claimed that people do it to be “cool.”
“I hate having to put my headphones on, but good lord, don’t be that person,” he wrote. “It may sound cool, but you’re nothing but an elitist (jerk).” Elite? What does this have to do with elitism?
If that makes you as confused as I am, you’re not alone: no one on Reddit really understood it either.
“How can you become an elitist if you leave keystroke sounds on?” asked one of the bewildered Redditors. “I seriously doubt anyone feels superior because ‘phone makes noise while typing.’”
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The man answered this question by saying, ‘Most of the people I see (do) are the same as those who drank Starbucks when it was a status (symbol)’, which for those of you who are too young to remember the years’ Remembering the 90s and early 2000s sounds crazy, but Starbucks WAS indeed a status symbol when. It was even politicized! Conservatives called us “latte liberals,” and that was code for being outrageous and elitist! (My how things are and haven’t changed).
Of course, that still doesn’t make sense: there’s nothing fun or status-related about turning on tapping sounds on your phone. That’s nothing. Phones aren’t even cool anymore anyway! They’re just something we all have in our pockets now. It’s not 2004! But there’s no denying that typing noise is very annoying – it got us there.
Many pointed out that some use the sounds for accessibility reasons, but people usually don’t know how to turn them off.
A few people pointed out that they use the taps because it helps them type more accurately. Keyboard clicks, the official name for the sounds on an iPhone, are part of the phone’s haptic features that make the phone’s functions tangible.
Essentially, the clicks are a replacement for the actual buttons we had on our phones in the Middle Ages. “I literally have it because of the tactile feel, because buttons no longer exist on a smartphone keyboard,” one person wrote. “I’m sorry, but without this I’ll write a lot more wrong.”
So okay, some people have turned on these incredibly annoying sounds as a sort of tool, which is fine of course, and we should probably all be less judgmental. But as other Redditors have noted, this is probably not the most common reason for having them on; many people just don’t know they can be turned off.
“Some old people don’t know they can take them out!” wrote one Redditor. “When I see older people in my family doing it, I now ask them if they like it that much… Nine times out of 10 they say, ‘Can you stop that? Please do it for me!’”
I had this experience with my almost 90 year old aunt, who saw me silently writing a text message one day and said, “Why isn’t your phone making those (redacted) CLICK SOUNDS?” I showed her how to turn them off and… her gratitude was overwhelming. “I was about to flush the (redacted) thing down the (redacted) toilet!” (Aunt Steph has a mouth on her that is not suitable for this website.)
Anyway, for the record, here’s how to do it: On an iPhone, go to Settings, then Sounds & Haptics, then Keyboard Feedback and turn off Sound and/or Haptics. On Android, go to Settings, then Sound & Vibration, System Sound, then turn off keyboard sounds.
There! Now you have no excuse not to take them out. (Unless you need them of course, in which case you’ll be forgiven… but only barely!)
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.