My Demon Phone

Evil comes in many forms

Quite some time ago, my husband and I bought a phone with a digital answering machine and a cordless handset. At the time, phones with internal answering machines weren't quite as common as they are now.

Unfortunately, this phone seems to have been possessed by some sort of demon that makes it let out a loud, obnoxious "door phone" tone at random intervals. When I say loud and obnoxious, I really mean it. I can't imagine who designed the noise that this thing puts out but I hope he lost his job or was assigned to another section.

The worst thing about this is that the malfunction is part of the phone's functionality. It apparently can be hooked up to your doorbell so it goes off when someone rings it. I'm not sure what this idiotic function is for since it essentially duplicates the doorbell's function (and does not usurp it). I can only imagine that it's for the many, many Japanese people living in such overly spacious and cavernous dwellings that they need to place a phone in another part of their home to hear that a Jehovah's Witness or newspaper salesman has rang the far distant doorbell.

The only way to stop this horrific noise from going off is to unplug the phone from its power source. If I do that, we can't use the answering machine or dial outgoing calls. We can only accept incoming calls. That's some nice design. We've inspected the manual and tried to push the "doa hon" button off and on to no avail. Our actions appear to have no effect on it's random bellowing.

If we can't get our hands on a techno-exorcist, I guess we'll have to pop for a new phone. And we'll make sure that no door phone button appears anywhere on the beast.