My computer had been making noises at me for about two weeks now. It is a sound that resembles the chirp of an electronic bird. No window comes up when it happens so I was in the dark until today regarding the reason for hearing this noise every ten minutes.
I had figured out that it was coming from Microsoft Entourage – it signals that you have a new entry in Entourage’s error log, stemming from a message that was too large to send. It was stuck in the outbox and the noise would occur every time it failed to send.
What I couldn’t figure out was how to access my outbox, because it didn’t appear that either my IMAP or Exchange accounts had outboxes. Consulting with a DoIT employee, he noted that Entourage holds outgoing mail locally and we had just been looking for the outbox in the wrong set of folders. After deleting the giant message, I no longer received the error or the sound effects. But it brings up a flaw in the design of this program and others like it.
If you don’t combine a sound with a visible warning, how is anyone supposed to know what that sound means, or how to get rid of it? Furthermore, it’s impossible to describe the sound in words – it has no onomatopoeic translation. As a result, looking at help forums didn’t help much. In fact, it worried me more with explanations of noises pertaining to hardware malfunction and worse.
When you design software, there needs to be an easy way to know what program is making a sound and why. Otherwise there’s no hope in figuring out what’s wrong.
