2w ago

Boomers with their loud Samsung phone sounds

Like, what the fuck. Waiting rooms, libraries, movie theaters, on and on. That same fucking Samsung notification sound, at volume 11/10. For every notification every 20 seconds as Fox/CNN/QVC forces more and more bullshit on you and therefore us. Do you not know that you’re pissing everyone off? Do you not care? I hope it’s because you’re too stupid to turn off sound notifications, but the high volume suggests that you like it and want more. Your generation was the one making us be quiet in public spaces and now you ruin them for everybody. Seriously, fuck you.

164 comments

I don't think this post is a good fit. The name of the community is "mildly infuriating", not "absolutely enraging"!

Its not just notifications. Its also them watching entire videos at high volume in waiting rooms, ads and everything. That or its endless scrolling and completely unrelated audio blasts chained together doing literal psychic damage to everyone around.
It drives me fucking NUTS. The worst part is they're the ones that will be the first to complain about kids these days being glued to their phones.
- OMG my dad does this while I'm on the phone with him. If I had a dollar for every time I had to tell him to turn off the video on his phone so I could hear him........
  
  I would end the call at that point.
- It drives me fucking NUTS. The worst part is they’re the ones that will be the first to complain about kids these days being glued to their phones.
  My dad used to call us the "No-frendo" generation. Nowadays I have to remind him constantly how rude it is to have you phone out at dinner, for example.
- Not to mention that all the waiting rooms also have TVs in them, making noise. I really miss the days when you would go places and it was just quiet unless someone was talking (and it would be to someone physically present). The place I take my car for an oil change or whatever plays country music in its waiting room. It's torture.

A neat thing about living in Japan is that there are announcements and signs everywhere telling you to please keep your phone silent and to turn down the volume on your headphones so that noise doesn't leak out either. 'Silent mode' is literally called 'manner mode.'

I'm going to start a community called, UnnecessarilyGenerational. This would be post #1.
- My first thought was "How is this a boomer thing, I see people of all ages doing this."
- Fucking boomers and their Samsung phones. Why can't they just be like us Millennials and our Apple iPhones? 😤
- Typical zoomer reaction
- That’s actually not a bad idea!

I suspect that a large part of the problem is a combination of hearing loss and a lack of subconscious awareness of their phone. In both cases (and especially combined), they would likely not even hear the notification if it was at a volume you or I would consider reasonable. So, from their perspective, it is quiet. Any quieter and it would be too quiet to notice.
Of course, anyone capable of basic empathy would also realise that such a perspective is their subjective experience of the world and simply turn the volume off/down until later to avoid annoying other people. Sadly, many of their ilk seem to have forgotten the lessons they taught us as kids.

For the record, not a boomer, but why are you targeting that group? Everywhere I go it is someone, just as often young as old, that thinks I want to hear their notifications, tiktok, or whatever bullshit of the day they want everyone to hear.
- It's almost always old people with their sound on, ime
  
  To be fair, no it isnt.
  It's black people.
  No it isnt, but you see my point.
  Its inconsiderate assholes, not old people. Inconsiderate assholes are all ages. For instance, you are an inconsiderate asshole.
  
  The most annoying phone thing to me is Zoomers / teens / old people / anyone with videos and music playing from their shitty little phone speakers in public. A lot of kids seem to be phone and tablet addicts and don't comprehend the noise they're making is bothering others.
  But a few notification sounds is nothing. It's all about the quantity and duration and volume. Personally I don't put my phone on Silent or Vibrate unless I'm in a quiet public place like a movie or an office - but I also control all notifications with a heavy hand, not allowing any bullshit apps notification permission unless it's an important direct communication.
  
  As a boomer with tinnitus, (I've had since maybe 4 years old), and now hearing loss, I can't hear shit on my cell phone at 50% volume. And I have alarms set to remind me to take certain inhalers at set times during the day, (Thanks Long Covid!). So, yeah, I have the volume up enough to probably piss you off. It pisses me off too-- I hate those things and having to live like this. But it's not like turning the volume off or down is really an option for me.
  But chances are I probably forgot the damn thing at home anyway.
  
  Not my experience at all, seems to be just about anyone can be an asshole.
  I was in the library for the first time in ages, two of them actually. Mixed group of people, pretty busy. I am happy to say I heard not a single notification or phone ring the whole time. I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned it. That was kind of refreshing. Unlike waiting rooms, the bus, coffee shop, the quiet lounge at the airport. Maybe I got lucky.
- In my experience, boomers are by far the biggest group who does this. My parents are the worst offenders, so maybe that affects my perception. But any waiting room or library or whatever, it’s almost always boomers when I see it.

Yes but it isn't only boomers. Teenagers do this all the time in public transport (usually watching loud videos) and they don't have any excuses like for example being half deaf or not knowing how to mute their phone. It is one of the reasons why I prefer driving. I don't want to have an argument with some stupid shit every time I get on the metro.
- Honestly, have people forgotten headphones exist?
  Not long ago, it used to be a mortifying social suicide to be the kind of person that let their phone make a noise in a public place—let alone for an extended period of time!
  
  I’m in my early 40’s. I’m still mortified when the phone makes a sound when it shouldn’t. I always double check it’s on silent while going to a movie for example. Meanwhile there’s fuckheads three rows up playing TikTok at full volume while the trailers are running.
  Honestly, you should legally be allowed to beat someone like that to death with their own device.
  
  So many phones don't have headphones jacks anymore, and Bluetooth is a bigger hastle than just plugging in a wire. And all the cheap ones use Micro-B instead of C for charging, so now you have to worry about two wires. USB-C/lightning to Aux adapters are unnecessarily uncommon and take the charging port. Same with wired headphones that have a USB-C or lightning jack.
  The tech companies have made courtesy inconvenient.
- I'd believe some teenagers don't know how to mute their phone. Tech illiteracy is off the chart these days, especially for young people.
  
  I know engineers in their mid twenties who don't know what an sd card is, or a megapixel, or the term "specs". We have reached a stage of populism where people don't care about anything but brand and just buy the most expensive model
- If someone actively plays loud shit in public transport, they should get a lifetime ban for it. Nobody likes being on public transport; I’d drive a car if I could. I’m basically forced to be there.
  So if someone actively makes that worse, they should be forced to walk and contemplate their life choices.
  
  TIL that I'm nobody. I chose to live where I live because it meant that I could rely on public transportation and get rid of my car.

Nah it's Gen Z and their loud iPhone bell notifications.
WE'RE IN CLASS!! SILENCE YOUR PHONES DAMMIT!
- No it's any asshole listening to TikTok or YouTube on speaker
  
  There is almost nothing worse than someone else's tiktok feed playing out loud in the same room you are.
  It's insufferable.
- First world problems

I don't know if this is just boomers. I remember a person my age in Uni some years ago who just sat there with her freaking iPhone not silent, end every few minutes a message came with a loud "DING!"

My mom tried to watch Chinese drama shows on public transport. I told her to stop it before some pissed off hillbilly use violence (for context: at the time, there were some news reports of people getting shot for blasting loud music from their car)
- Now that same hillbilly would come up to your mother and try to speak to her in broken Mandarin that they learned on RedNote.
  
  Ni hao. Ni hao ma? Wo hen hao.
  Sorry I haven't learnt how to write Chinese yet.

Oh, my absolute favorites are the people that have the volume all the way up and send text messages. You get to hear the send/receive text alert over and over. Then there’s the ones that get the phone call with the obnoxiously loud ring, take forever to find their phone, look at it (still ringing loudly) to see who is calling, and don’t silence the ring while they decide whether or not to answer.
- I see you've met my dad.
  
  Lol, he must hang out in airports a lot.

My mom is 75. She knows nothing about how cell phones work. She thinks to charge your phone you need to turn the phone off first.
She doesn't understand that airplane mode turns off your voice and data radios.
She holds the phone like a star trek communicator, NOT on speaker, and then complains she can barely hear you.
I think the boomers brains are just mush.
Edit: forgot to mention she turns the airplane mode ON and then turns the whole phone OFF. Once it's off, that's when she plugs it in.
Then she complains that turning her phone on always takes a while. My brother in law installed an app that just turns airplane mode off upon boot. That "taking a while" is the radios turning back on.
Otherwise, she used to call him from her landline (yeah) weekly to say her phone was broken. Everhtime it was just still in airplane mode. She does what she wants, doesn't understand any of it, and you can't explain it or talk her out of doing it her way.
......and people on this site were trying to convince me to teach her linux. Hell I don't even know what I'm doing on linux. That would be like the blind leading the stubborn.
- While not as bad, my dad is kind of like that with phones. I installed Linux mint and honestly as long as the same ginormous Firefox icon (which I told him was the internet and YouTubes - same as windows) is around, he can still get to his karaoke and YouTube videos.
  On my side I know it is pretty much impossible for him to get a malicious executable now, every few weeks we do upgrades when I visit which are a lot faster than windows updates.
- My mom has long been clueless and resistant about anything tech related. Years back I switched her laptop to Linux because I was so sick of all the stupid crap with malware on windows. We used to have to Fix her computer one or more times a month. With Linux, that went to zero, and the only issue was setting up the software to download images from her camera (this was about 2010). These days she has a Chromebook and is constantly convinced it’s “screwed up”.
- I'm continuously astonished that people like this exist (and so fucking many). How do they survive day to day?
- I've never met her, but I hate her. My mom is almost as bad, going to weird lengths to misunderstand.
  A conservative distro of Linux is more reliable than Windows. Debian or something. Overwrite the Windows so it can't break the boot menu. Apple I don't know about.
  
  Hate is a very powerful word. If you hate people you've never even met, that may be more of a you problem that you should talk with a therapist about. My mom is stubborn, bipolar, and refuses to accept help. But she's never done a single thing to you for you to hate her. That's all on you...

My coworker does this with video and shit too it kills me...
5 guys in the same area, 4 of us know how headphones work, but Oldie McDust has to make us listen to his crap music and whatever video he's listening to at the time...
He figured out how tictok works, even got himself a damn Bluetooth speaker but can't bother to take the hint from the rest of us and get headphones...
- Open-plan office spaces are pure torture.
  Get him some cheap 90's era headphones (you know with the ribbon head band, and the shitty foam pads,) and leave a passive-aggressive note informing him his listening happens suck.
- My coworker does this too. Videos, messages, his fucking doorbell. I work from home now so it can't bother me anymore, but idk how our boss can stand being in the same room as him.
  He was playing a video during a teams meeting the other day and everyone could hear it. He didn't stop when called out on it (boss wasn't there that day), and the person leading the meeting literally said, "how does he keep getting unmuted?"
- "Take the hint" i.e. we never told him it bothers us

I took a commuter train to the big city the other day and I couldn't believe how many other commuters were scrolling through TikTok with speaker on, or video calling their parents with speaker on. Nobody else wants to hear your shitty music videos.

Don't try to hang Android phones on boomers. Boomers are dipshits with tech and iphones are designed for toddlers. Majority of boomers use iPhones.
- We refer to iphones as boomerphones 😂
  
  Word

And stupid kids blasting their calls on loudspeaker, holding their phones like absolute idiots
- We used to laugh about sidetalking... Now everyone does, as I call it, the sandwich. Holding flat in front of mouth.

It’s so fucking annoying. Your phone shouldn’t really make ANY sound as far as I’m concerned, but I’ll allow a low volume ring or single beep or bloop for a notification. But if your phone feels the need to make a sound every 20 seconds while you’re looking at the fucking thing, you need to turn that shit off.

Notifications etc I can understand if you don’t know how to use tech properly.
What I don’t understand is how every older person seems to have loud speakerphone conversations in public. They had landlines most of their lives so why do this?
- Just join in. That's what speakerphone is for.
- If you add in shouting at the phone to write text messages, you have my mother in law
- Someone told them they'd get brain cancer.
  Seriously though, a lot of us olds have our phones Bluetoothed to our hearing aids. So at least with us you only get to hear one side of the conversation. "I'M ON THE BUS!"
- My mother can’t comprehend how to use a cell phone without it being on speaker. She also doesn’t know how to switch it to speaker. If I hand her the phone in normal mode she holds it out in front of her and can’t figure out why she can’t hear anything.
  
  I mean... You just hold it like a telephone? Lol... Surely she's used a telephone?
- I disagree that it's confined to an age group, but put into the category of speakerphone when inappropriate would be the people with their phone call paired to their car's speakers, turned way up. I agree with a posted solution, either join in, visibly listen in, or just stare at them.

Ha ha ha, generalizations are fun and hateful.

I was at the Dr office Monday. While in the waiting room, at full volume, everyone experienced:
"Hello Moto" "Hello Moto" "Hello Moto" "Hello Moto" "Hello Moto"
- Several years ago, I was in a waiting room while my father had heart surgery. Two things I remember were that for some reason they had us in an area that was primarily the waiting room for pediatric surgery and, a woman with one of the other families in the same lobby was getting a call every 5 minutes. I remember these things because the woman's ringtone was "If I die young" by The Band Perry. Every 5 fucking minutes, this woman's phone started screaming "If I die young, bury me in......." This was enough to make me want to fly off the handle waiting on my 60 year old father's surgery. I can't imagine if I'd been with a family who was waiting to hear about a child. To this day I can't hear that song while seeing red for a minute.

Thats cause they old and cant hear shit…. We are all headed that way.
- So? Put it on vibrate.
  
  I don't know about other people, but I often miss vibration notifications. If I'm doing basically anything at all, even just walking, it's a good bet I'll miss it. The pattern of vibration, etc., doesn't seem to make much difference, either. I basically have to be doing nothing before I'll detect it. This has been true of every phone I've had - flip phones, iPhones, and Androids. I keep it in a front pocket, too, so it seems like that should work.
  I still use vibrate all the time. If there's something I'm specifically waiting for that I don't want to miss, I'll turn on the sound.
  
  women’s pants typically don’t have pockets, so you’d get NO notification.
  
  Vibrate is worst than ringing for him.
- We are but I'm gonna have my phone on vibrate cuz I have a shred of self awareness
  
  My dad will not feel the phone vibrate.. it sucks getting old. I have tried it all with him even with the loud ring tone still doesnt hear it.

While yes I feel you on this ... the boomers are probably going deaf and need the extra volume... the asshats who have the phone on speaker like a goddamn walkie talkie in those same public places should be drawn and quartered.
Generally a bigger push towards "maybe don't be a pubic nuisance" for everyone: regardless of age/generation couldn't hurt.

I know boomers do it but I also see every generation do it. I know boomers do it because it's a accessibility reasons due to age and poor hearing and the phone will not get loud enough for them to actually hear it without speakerphone.
I fucking hate it regardless but how else are people with poor hearing able to actually hear anything on these phones though.
Usually most of the time the main problem I have is fucking people playing music on there phones, usually people 25 or younger who just don't care about others. I get more of them then actually boomers doing it.
Learning technology when you grown up without it and then expecting to learn all about it when your aging and getting older and brains just don't work as well.
Regardless of who it's fucking annoying and I hate it but I mainly blame the companies who don't incorporate better accessibility for people and society (mainly past society) just never teaching people and society as a whole for this fucking American shit culture we have.
- Phones can also vibrate. That’s pretty damn accessible for the hearing impaired.
  
  Very true it is accessible. Although I don't know any phone or anybody that's able to hear words from phone vibrations like that. Is this a new type of accessibility option?
- They make hearing aids
  
  Which cost literally thousands of dollars for something that isnt fucking trash

The generation who refuses to use headphones and uses phones on speaker mode is complaining about the noise coming from other peoples phones?
- Nope, I’m GenX.
  
  My apologies, I didn’t realise there were two of us.

Do you not care?
bingo. they dont give a fuck.

I had a professor whose phone would go off every one or two minutes during lecture. Same guy would use the word "literally" in every other sentence (always incorrectly). So many annoying things in that class.

I had the Samsung notification whistle down pat back in the S3/S4/S5 era. Everyone had that as their default and it was so easy to fuck with people.

Yea I honestly have seen a huge uptick of it in the last few months. Like why the fuck are you setting your email notification to machine gun volleys or fucking crowd cheers.

Boobedy boop boop
- 😡

Unless I am actively waiting for something, the phone is on vibrate. But even then my attitude is notifications are what I see when I bother to take a look. There is usually nothing that cant wait until I want to take the time to deal with it.
People are so Pavlovian about their devices, I see it all the time.

The ones on TikTok kill me. They’re the first to complain about younger generations being so loud with their phones, but meanwhile they’re just scrolling that shit in public, a new video every few seconds, with the volume turned up to max.
So you hear every new voice/music with no context.
They do get mad if you have noise cancelling earbuds in, too, so we can’t win. Somehow that makes us in the wrong as well.

They are called BOOMers for a reason X)
- You may let yourself out

There was one person who had a whole ringtone as the notification sound. IT would go for 20 seconds.

I heard a Samsung whistle that ended in a fart sound...12 times in less than five minutes. All numbers are estimated, but I feel like I am undershooting it.

My parents do this. I'll be sitting across the room at night, playing some hades on my steam deck, and I'll suddenly get jumpscared by my mum browsing facebook

BO DU BU DUP DUP!
- 😡😡😡

There are rare cases where full volume is necessary, but definitely not for the vast majority of people. For example, my phone is set to about 50% ringer volume, but I'm also on-call for work sometimes and I have that phone constantly set to 100% so I know that I'll hear it in any circumstance. It also only goes off once every couple of months or so and not constantly.

Back in my day, we let the entire ringtone play out because it was "Who let the dogs out", and we paid 99 cents for it. There was no way we would admit that paying for a ringtone was a dumb idea, so we had to justify it any time we got a phone call.
(By we, I mean millennials, but I never did buy a ringtone. Never understood it, and have used vibrate since my first phone.)

Forgot about that until visiting family in Florida. Phones and medical devices beeping everywhere

Remember Nokia bricks? Couldn't call them the quietest sounding phone as well.p

Dp you not know that you’re pissing everyone off?
Did you tell them they’re pissing you off?
- No, I stew about it and post rants on the internet. It’s called “manners”.
- Somebody was playing shitty rap/drill music on the train a couple of years back.
  I thought I might have to be the one to tell him, but then he made a call on speakerphone explaining to somebody that he'd just got out of prison and was looking for somewhere to stay.
  I decided not to tell him after all.

They are butter spread too thin.

They see it as a status symbol, like the iPhone tone when the original iphone was released. Idiots.

I dont read before responding because what someone else says is irrelevant to me.
Keep shovelin

You know, the thing is THEY CANT HEAR VERY WELL NOW so they might not give a shit.
Greeting from the generation in between.
- If it was me, I'd just set my phone to vibrate, but maybe they don't know how?
  
  I have several examples of this behavior in close range to me. You're right many don't know, turns out these devices are far too complex for many people (not blaming them).
  And yes the op was provocative boomer bashing but with many things theres also truth inside. My post was building on that and I know people that literally can not hear you or eg the fire alarm either. It's really difficult.

Every phone out there that can be heard by people 100m away is the indication of a garbage person, that's not linked to a brand or a specific group.
Seriously, fuck you.

I have never experienced this

It's fun to watch people who probably get pissed off about ableism think it doesn't apply when they're mad about old people losing their hearing because they are a political monolith who all voted for Romney and Trump.
- You can put your damn phone on silent hearing loss or not.
- Do you know what makes hearing videos and stuff on your phone easier when you have hearing loss? Fucking headphones.
- That's a pretty weak argument considering that there are other ways to get notifications, such as vibration. Also, if you're getting notifications every minute or two, there's no reason to have it play a sound or do anything else. The only reason you need to be notified is when it's an infrequent occurrence.

164 comments