It’s time to wish the Sound of the Beep a fond farewell.  We started running the Sound of the Beep at The Rhinoceros Timesin the mid 1990s.  I had read an article about a newspaper hooking up an answering machine to a phone line and transcribing the results to the delight of its readers.  I called up the editor to find out if there was more to it than that.   He said that there wasn’t and warned me that for a month or two we’d be inundated with calls but then the calls would dwindle down to a couple a week.