It arrives pre-installed, a small musical figure composed by someone whose name will never surface, meant to be pleasant enough to not annoy but forgettable enough to not distract. It succeeds at both, which is its own quiet triumph. In crowded rooms, its opening notes trigger a reflexive check of every pocket within earshot, a synchronized fumbling that resembles, from a distance, some kind of folk dance.
Most owners disable it within the first week, migrating to something with more personality, a snippet of a song, a marimba loop, a bark. Those who leave it running are a distinct subpopulation: the unbothered, the busy, the ones who have made peace with sounding exactly like everyone else's phone in 2013. The tone itself rarely evolves gracefully. It updates every few years to something marginally more chiming, more digital wind chime than digital telephone, but the DNA persists, a few notes engineered to be audible over traffic without inducing panic. It has been heard in funeral homes, job interviews, and once, memorably, during a moment of silence. Nobody remembers choosing it. Nobody remembers not choosing it either. It simply plays, dutifully, until muted, standing as perhaps the most widely heard piece of music in human history that absolutely no one can hum from memory.