Ding dong

One of the stories we've heard of the previous owner of this house was that he was so antisocial he had his doorbell removed completely. He had to have one reinstalled to make the house ready for sale. Instead of a 1950s-era ding-dong chime, we have an electronic tone that gives a deep, electronic beep beeeeep when the doorbell rings. There's basically a button stuck to the outside of our house (mounted, I'm sure the writer for the manual would want me to say) and a doorbell part that plugs into an outlet that makes the bell noise.

When we first moved in, the doorbell receiver was stuck into the most accessible outlet in the house, which meant hours of entertainment for the baby. So it was moved out of baby reach.

I noticed that our doorbell was ringing when nobody was pushing the bell. We're in an urban environment, and there are a lot of doorbells within our area. Apparently, someone else was on the same wavelength. But it didn't happen too often and added a bit of mystery to my day: will there actually be someone at the door?

But then there was a day where our doorbell kept ringing, and ringing, and ringing. I looked out the front window and there was our neighbor, across the street, installing a new electronic doorbell. On exactly the same wavelength, apparently. The default, I'm guessing. Beep beep, beep beep, beep beep.

I disconnected the doorbell. When C came home, he took down our doorbell and figured out how to re-assign a code (ah, engineers). But before he changed our the doorbell button over, I sat inside my house and rang the doorbell about a million times and watched my neighbor go into and out of his door to see what was wrong with his new doorbell.