In around the year 2000, for career day I went to work with my uncle. He worked in IT for General Mills. Their office was very much a stereotypical poorly lit IT cave in the basement.
All their computers were a constant barrage of custom pop culture sound effects for every action. Minimize a window and a computer would emit like a "Ooh baby" clip for instance. Place had the tone of a morning radio show. Seemingly every action you could attach a sound effect to, they had. It would drive me insane trying to work like that.
Tech culture is very different from what it once was.
I worked at a help desk one summer and every inbox had a different sound effect. We had several different external customers each with a dedicated machine to handle their tickets. The most critical customers (i.e. the biggest fines) got the loudest, most annoying sounds. Everything was an animal sound so the place literally sounded like a zoo on busy days. The manager absolutely hated bringing various big shot tours through our call center because of the ridiculous noise but we also had a perfect record.
One of my first experiences with our home PC's was downloading wav files of movie and TV clips off of AngelFire and GeoCities sites and assigning different windows tasks to play them to prank my dad. Error dialog popup? Beavis and Butthead's "Breaking the law, breaking the law". Out of disk space? Johnny Mnemonic "I can carry nearly eighty gigs of data in my head". He thought it was hilarious and would reassign them to his own clips that he found and we continuously tried one-upping each other to find the most annoying possible sound for every windows function.
I worked for a woman who had the Microsoft helper (like Clippy) but chose the cat avatar, and it would meow ALL day. It was funny for about 2 hours and unbearable beyond that!
In my collection of CDROMs, I had one titled "Wired For Sound Pro" -- it was some custom software that could add sound effects to a ton of Windows events, as well as a huge library of sound files to attach to those events. I think products like this were to showcase "Multimedia PCs" that were starting to make it big in the mid 90s...
This could be kind of fun if done in moderation. Maybe a git hook that lets the creator of the PR select a song to play over the speakers when the merge request goes through. Some people might get pissed off, but I think it would be nice to have a bit more whimsy in software dev. As long as everyone is on the same page, should be fine.
Most of them play advertisements while you fuel up. I hate it. The only thing that I like about New Jersey forbidding me from touching a gas pump is that I'm not subjected to ads for diarrhea medication or low-APR loans every time I fuel up.
A local station had (I think past tense, though it made it a lot less likely for me to go there to check) their pumps playing ads in "attract mode" when nobody was using them. So going there late at night and filling up involved listening to a poorly-timed round of "BUY NOW" utterances from eight different sources (because of course they weren't synchronized). And you couldn't really mute it because it was all the other pumps.
I’ve been doing an unfortunate amount of driving the last year, across a bunch of states, and have still only seen this at two or three stations ever. One of them in my home city, and I avoided that (conveniently-located) station for that reason.
Maybe there are a few cities where it’s a ton more common than most of the rest of the country.
Great ready for the newest innovation, putting a small cellphone sized screen on the nozzle that you put into your vehicle. https://www.dekra.nl/en/smarter-nozzle/
Gas pumps at the local grocer play beeps when you hit a key (consumer loyalty # entry), but with a random delay. It's maddening how much harder this makes typing. OTOH, these pumps don't have video ads yet.
Just wait until they integrate the devices with AGI + TTS and either tie it to your ad history or one-click purchasing.
AI Fridge: "We noticed you're almost out of cheese. Would you like to make your dairy extraordinary today with Tillamook Sharp Cheddar? Say OK to order now!"
Enfleshened One: "No. Please self destruct."
AI Fridge: "...Take that back, or I'll wilt all your lettuce."
All their computers were a constant barrage of custom pop culture sound effects for every action. Minimize a window and a computer would emit like a "Ooh baby" clip for instance. Place had the tone of a morning radio show. Seemingly every action you could attach a sound effect to, they had. It would drive me insane trying to work like that.
Tech culture is very different from what it once was.