The Mosquito Cell Phone Conspiracy
Did you know your kid can now use their cell phone silently to text each other during class.
This one works with me because I am getting a little hard of hearing. Nowadays children are sending and receiving text messages and phone calls by using high-frequency tones that are inaudible to most people over thirty. These are called mosquito tones.
Mosquito tones were invented by geniuses in New Zealand who used them to discourage teenagers from hanging around in stores. The high pitched buzzing really gets on a kid's nerves after ten minutes or so and they leave. This helps decrease damage to store kids and also shoplifting. The whole thing was invented by Compound Security Systems and called the anti-loitering machine.
However the same mosquito tones are also now used to fool us old folks into thinking they are doing their homework when they are really talking with their friends. This is because most people over thirty suffer from presbucusis which is a general gradual age related hearing loss. Compound Security also developed these same ring tones for teenagers to download on their phones.
The fact is that as you grow older your ability to hear high pitched sounds deteriorates and the tones that you could hear at twenty become a distant member. The older you get the less higher tones you can hear. If you want to test this out you can go to different sites on the internet that will give a demonstration of how high you can hear by playing tones for you.
I found out that my daughter had these tones because I was sitting in a waiting room with her and my daughter who is eight years old. I noticed that my one daughter seemed to be playing with her cell phone but I was not too concerned because I believed she was obeying the sign in the doctor's office that commanded everyone to turn their cell phones off.
I clued into the whole thing when my younger daughter started complaining of hearing a high whining noise . It was then that I noticed that she never heard it unless my sixteen year old daughter was playing with that cell phone. When I demanded to see my older daughter's phone I was amazed to see she was texting on it. Neither myself or the receptionist could hear the tone very well at all and that is why she was allowed to get away with it. What a little secret agent she can be sometimes!
If you do have some hearing you may be able to hear mosquito tones. They sound exactly what they are named after – like a high whining mosquito buzzing.