Don’t use that tone with me kiddo: Now kids can tone out parents
By Beth Teitell
Boston Herald Columnist
Wednesday, June 14, 2006 - Updated: 12:12 AM EST
“Students find ring tone adults can’t hear”
- Associated Press, June 12, 2006
It’s hard to decide what’s the most distressing nugget in that bit of news. Am I upset because this is yet another age-related insult of nature? Or am I ticked that the enemy is using technology we invented against us?
The kids-only tone was developed by a Welsh security company to help shopkeepers repel teenagers massing in front of their stores. The idea was for the “Mosquito” tone to scare away business-killing youngsters while letting the grownups shop in peace.
But guess who caught on, and is now using it as an alert for incoming text messages? Hint: It’s the same people who eat your food, spend your money and think you’re the stupidest person God put on Earth. And they couldn’t be happier about the irony. “Join the thousands of folks who can hear the ring tone that their parents can’t!” reads a message on the site where the tone is available for download, www.fork.com.
That’s how it should be, said Alisha Hines, a seventh-grader at Josiah Quincy Upper School in Boston. “Kids need their privacy and stuff,” she explained while her classmates nodded along. “Parents are too nosy.”
Strangely, the very children able to hear this high-pitched sound cannot hear sounds in the more normal range, like a parent saying, “Clean your room” or “Get off the Internet and go to bed.” Hmmm. Maybe it’s time for us to move to the higher frequency. Fight them on their own turf, so to speak. Note to self: pick up dog whistle.
As word of the escalation in the age-old war spread, one teacher said he wasn’t worried about the seeming advantage conferred by the tone. “Isn’t that just vibrate?” asked Tim Kelleher, a history teacher at Josiah Quincy Upper School.
But parents weren’t so nonplused. “Now they have their own ring tones?” asked Kelli McDermott, a secretary in the headmaster’s office at Brookline High School and the mother of three teenagers. “It’s like an underground thing.”
While the thought of an in-your-face underground network is unsettling, we at least have one thing in our favor. Many schools will confiscate a phone if a student tries to use it.
Home-schoolers, you’re on your own.
