Doorbells

I hate my doorbell.

I should start with the basic fact that I have a doorbell at all. This is a major change in my life. In my entire adult life, living outside of my parents home, I have never once had a doorbell! Not in any of the three locations I lived during college, not during my brief stay in China, my first "apartment" in India hardly had a door, much less a bell. The second one had no doorbell. The third apartment had a little button outside the door. It had a picture of a bell on it and there was a small item above my bed that looked kind of like a speaker, but I was afraid to press the button to find out what it would do. It may have been a doorbell, but considering my entire "apartment" was the size of a mid-sized american bedroom and we didn't have electricity about one third of the time, we knocked.

A doorbell is just not part of my mental vocabulary.

You have to understand that after two years in India, I have a relatively low tolerance for technology. My friend's daughter, who spent most of her life that she can remember in India, recently arrived in Taiwan and has a terrible fear of elevators. India simply does not have them. And, after living in a country that generally doesn't have reliable electricity, the up-down locking scary moving electric box is quite terrifying!

As for me, I haven't coped much better. During my first week in Taiwan, I got into a fight with an electric door. My friend and I walked into a shop, with a sliding door, and the door was still open after we came in. Being a sliding door, and it was a cold, rainy day outside, I decided to be nice and close the door. It fiercely resisted. I struggled and pulled, occasionally managing to get it halfway closed, at which point I'd be forced to give up, and it would slowly, purposefully slide open again. I repeated this struggle three or four times before I decided it was best for me to get away from the door and hope no one hated me for leaving it open. About 10 seconds later, the automatic mechanical door slid shut with a buzz.

My doorbell is in this new category for me. I have a buzzer which rings on a little telephone in my living room if someone tries to enter the apartment complex and buzzes me. It has a television screen that should show me the person buzzing. The screen is broken, probably the only broken technology in Taiwan. I like it that way, it's a comfort.

But the doorbell. I'm not sure it should even be called a bell as it's simply an electric speaker. It doesn't ring. The noise it makes is as if you took a heavily sedated person, covered them in honey, sprinkled sunflower seeds all over them, put them in the middle of an aviary full of parakeets, put a string of small chinese firecrackers at their feet, allowed the parakeets to perch and eventually fall asleep on them and then remotely detonated the firecrackers.

The ensuing cacaphone and shrieking is what my doorbell sounds like. I suppose they believe that sounding like birds should be "relaxing."

It's not.

As most of my friends know, I am not comfortable with surprising sounds to alert me to your presence. My first three cell phones were always on buzz, lest the sound of them ringing frighten me (or cause my mom to dance fake ballet, but that's another story for another time.) One friend, realizing my phone was not on silent, called me while sitting in the same van just to hear me loudly cuss. In fact, it wasn't until phones could be programmed to ring with your Mp3 of choice that I allowed my phone to "ring." Currently, Kunga's soothing voice sings "ashang lolo" to me whenever you call. The result is that I don't pick up my phone, but instead start singing along and get very disappointed when it stops.

Fortunately, my doorbell has only been used three times. Most of my friends have been kind enough to either knock or meet me at the gate to my apartment complex. My doorbell was used once when I was shown the apartment and my landlady wanted to demonstrate the doorbell, once when my landlady came for my rent, and today when a friend came over.

Each time I reacted terrified, shouting in Chinese and English "Wait a minute!" while scrambling madly to get to the door, desperately praying that they won't firecracker the parakeets again. I usually bang my foot or knee on something as I rush to the door. I suppose the doorbell is inspiring at least.

The point is: I hate my doorbell. It scares me.