Hands Free?

I'm the proud owner of a BlackBerry Pearl. Good enough phone, I suppose--just one thing bothers me. You've heard of "hands-free feature"? Meaning a speaker phone, I suppose. Anyway, this one seems to have a "wet hands feature": any time I'm washing my hands, or doing dishes, it goes off. Never a phone call, it just chimes that I've got an email or a text message/Twitter waiting for me as soon as I can reach for a towel. This gets annoying.