h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I too had this theory that people pick annoying ringtones in order to be emabarrassed into rapid answering of a call. I mean it's all very well to say to your mates "ooh look, I've got the theme from Rainbow as my phone ring" but when they call you up on the rush hour train, which is 6 hours late, and packed to the point they're shoving people into the guard's van on the sly (it happend to me....) it is desparately embarrassing. It gets worse when you get a model that has multiple ringtones, and all your friends want a different emabarrassing one....witness my emabarrassment at my mates programming obscure bit of '80s tv theme, and so on into my phone, and then calling me on packed trains, job interviews etc etc.....
So here's a thing.....When does a ringtone cease to be 'cool' (forgive me for the use of the word cool, I'm very old....) and begin to be annoying? And what is the most annoying ringtone to have? Nominations please.....

(N.B. if any of my mates are reading this I stand by my Tubular Bells ringtone, and maintain it's not-being-sad-ness.)

Nah, I don't find silly ringtones embarassing... Well, I don't actually own a mobile phone so I wouldn't know, would I ? But I find the ringtones I hear in "le métro" (yes I'm french ) quite entertaining, for want of a better form of background music.

I always find it amusing that if my mobile rings on a crowded train, a great many people start hunting for their phones, even though my ringtone is 'South of Heaven' by Slayer - hardly Top 40 material...

Collecting interesting ring tones is a bit of a guilty pleasure, I must admit... at the moment I have 'Final Countdown', the theme from 'Red Dwarf' and the theme from 'Knight Rider' on my phone - but it's set on normal 'ring-ring', to save me from embarassment. That's more useful than you might think; everyone else has musical ringtones, so mine stands out nicely.

I think a ringtone is always great the first couple of times that you hear it, then it rapidly becomes embarassing and stupid. That's why the next generation of young millionaires won't be oil barons or software geeks, but the guys who run the services where you ring up and have a tone delivered. They have huge turnover.

At least those actually sound like the genuine article. The most pathetic sight/sound I have been assaulted with in recent memory has been one of my friends trying to compose 'Money' by Pink Floyd on the phone's composer. Not only did it not sound like the song - it didn't actually sound like *music*. Self-composed tones are always the worst, because only the composer knows what it is meant to be and can recognise it - and the rest of us have our public space polluted with atonal squawking.