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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

> Sten's watched beeped on the hour

I have a bone to pick with whoever came up with this and thought it would be a good idea.

Could be worse. See the short story "Chronopolis" by J.G. Ballard.

It is set in a future where people's lives became so dominated by having to constantly use their watches and clocks to coordinate every aspect of their day that their health, sanity, and productivity were being serious harmed.

As a result clocks and watches were outlawed. Having one became a serious offense that would earn you a long jail sentence.

Instead of clocks and watches to coordinate people were assigned to groups, and there were public chimes or bells or something (I forget which) that would signal when it was time for your group to do various things. So for example if you are in the red group and want to go grocery shopping, you just wait until you hear the bell that signals red shopping time is starting.

And yet, reality is following along. Plenty of shops started to have special opening times for e.g. the elderly and disabled during the pandemic - annoyingly, it was often in the early morning, if you're in those categories you may need more time or help to get up in the morning so you'd miss the boat. There was also one where they reduce sensory input during certain times (dim lights, turn off music, etc), but similar thing of a 'block of time' for people in a certain category to go grocery shopping.

And of course there's working hours / clocking in and out.

> reduce sensory input during certain times (dim lights, turn off music, etc)

I intensely hate music at supermarkets, especially just before Christmas. They would also need to ban children during “spectrum hour”: I avoid shopping just after school is out to avoid screaming kids or kids on the loose.

Wouldn’t it feel like you were participating in a movie genre if everybody was on the autism spectrum at a particular time in the supermarket?

Church bells chime on the hour for most of the day.

They’re rather more melodious and smooth-toned, and typically quieter at the point they’re heard. Not harsh and jarring like those awful beeping watches.

I once imagined a nightmare: a classroom full of children who all had watches that beeped on the hour, not synchronised, with slightly varied pitches and patterns.

> I once imagined a nightmare: a classroom full of children who all had watches that beeped on the hour, not synchronised, with slightly varied pitches and patterns.

That was my classroom throughout the 80s and 90s.

I don’t think I ever experienced more than two or three, and that was bad enough. Say you’ve got thirty children, thirty watches, spread over five minutes, that’s an average of one every ten seconds.

It was most pupils in my classes. Kids got kudos for having fancier/louder chimes than others. Then came the rush of calculator watches, so everyone started getting watches confiscated before exams, and that other teacher's favourite: the TV Remote watch. Our school admistered masking tape and/or TipEx over the IR receivers to tackle this.

Same here, I think (but then this was quite a while ago) even the early mobile phones had such features.

The Elizabeth Tower in Westminster chimes a song every 15 minutes, progressively adding a new verse for each quarter, until on the hour you get the full song followed by a bong for each hour that it is.

As a child it fascinated me, but as an adult (who had a job in the area) it got tedious really quickly. 15 minutes is not that long.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_Quarters

The place I recently stayed at in Umbria, Italy for New Year helpfully tolled bells 1-to-4 times each 15 minutes to describe whereabouts in the hour we were. All night long.

Pretty common for church bells in Austria too. 1-4 times for 15 min intervals, and then on the full hour, after the four chimes, the number of the hour.

When would it chime 4 times?

Sorry, I didn't make this quite clear. At the full hour it first chimes four times, to denote that it's a full hour, and then, after a small pause, the number of the hour.

But not during the night...

They used to at least. Since I live in the city now I can't tell personally but I just called my mother and she says the clock tower in her town also rings during the night.

Edit: From what I could gather in a couple of minutes it still seems to be pretty widespread. There have been some court cases about it, to get specific churches to silence the bells, but not in general.

From various anecdotes, I'd expect that the locals slept soundly. But if the bell mechanism somehow broke during the night - a fair number of them would wake up, wondering at the odd silence.

It’s the same here (our 2km² city center has 5 churches, so you are never far from one), and I can confirm. You sleep easily through those, and I only hear them subconsciously. When someone is visiting and complains about how loud it is, I sometimes have to ask what they are talking about.

And then in Ireland, the bells occasionally toll eleventy billion starting at 10 to the hour.

If you're lucky. I used to live very near to a cathedral that started practicing change ringing Christmas carols in about October, generally with more enthusiasm than skill.

Is noise pollution. Nobody needs that anymore, but nobody knows how to stop it.

My dad, end 80s, had a watch which, if he would press a button, it would mention the time (in British English, him being native Dutch speaker). It would also beep every hour and mention the time (or just short beep depending on settings). He'd set it ahead of time a few minutes, so he could quickly go for a toilet break, for example. He'd use this information for all kind of things: to remember him to press the button for the time, to wake up, to go to toilet, to watch the news, to watch his favorite TV program. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: he was legally (but not completely) blind, and had MS. At one point he couldn't get the watch around his wrist anymore, so he hung it around his neck. Also, this watch taught me some British English and it taught me about AM/PM as a kid (we use 24H here). It probably helped me with 'clock reading'.

That’s one thing i am willing to defend to death lol.

I have a cheap casio watch that has this feature, and i love it. It doesn’t beep like an alarm continuously, it just does a singular beep at the top of the hour. It isn’t obnoxiously loud, and it helps me being mindful of time, as it is too easy for me to get engrossed in something and lose track of time.

No one has expressed a concern so far at work (back when we were in the office), and it has imo been even appreciated. Meetings started running over much less, and no one takes offense, as people by now know it is an automated beep and not me trying to push them “please end this meeting soon, it is running too long for my liking.” It isn’t super loud, and is easy to ignore (as it sounds like a random singular faint beep somewhere, cannot even pinpoint the direction it came from, but by now I have told everyone already what it was).

Note: years after I started using that feature, Apple introduced a similar feature for Apple Watch, except instead of a beep it does a single vibration on your wrist that only you could feel/perceive. That only vindicated my belief in usefulness of such a feature lol.

*One* person with an hourly beep is almost tolerable. More than one in an office? Completely intolerable.

I have had a quiet word with colleagues who set their watches to beep, then a slightly louder word with their manager when they persisted. The Apple Watch vibrate is different -- it's not going to disturb anyone else. It also wouldn't be quite so bad were it noisy, because at least smart watches should have accurate (and matching) time.

I'm glad for you that you have understanding colleagues :).

I think I missed an important point in my original comment, my situation wasn't an open-office setup. It was private offices + conference rooms. If it was in an open office where everyone is constantly subjected to that, that would absolutely be an annoying situation.

And fully agreed with your point about that feature on Apple Watch being all-around better due to only notifying you and not bothering anyone else around.

That feature (complication in mechanical watch parlance) is older than digital watches. Some of the fanciest mechanical watches in the world will play a chime on the hour/quarter/minute. It’s called a repeater complication. They were useful for the visually impaired or when the time was needed before artificial lighting was readily available.

I like it. Time is fleeting, time is money, etc. Being reminded of some of these is cool, for the inclined.

On a more everyday note, it's very useful if you know you're approaching top of the hour and you've got a task or a meeting due precisely at :00.

I used to wait for minutes for my grandfather’s German cuckoo clock to chime the hour. Noon was of course the best because it did a song and the dancers in lederhosen came out and danced while the wise cuckoo bird nodded. But even one o’clock with a single cuckoo was special.

I have something that blips on the hour. Not every hour though.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.nadolski.bl...

Ouch! For many years I had my watch do this. It's very handy. It's not loud like an alarm - just a quick beep and that's it. No one complained to me, although I stopped it long before I entered the workforce.

At one point I had my laptop reading the time every 15 minutes, because I can be absent minded. It didn’t make me focus. But I always muted my laptop when I wasn’t wear headphones so it didn’t annoy anyone.

I remember using this during hikes as a reminder to take a break and get some food and water into me.

In a way, its no different than having colleagues with audible push notifications pings..

Digital watches in general are a good sign that humans are amazingly primitive.

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