car alarms

Growing up my sister had (and still has) extremely sensitive hearing. She could hear every little sound and I can only imagine how incredibly annoying that must have been as a young person. I feel like maybe I have developed the same supersonic hearing as an adult (I was always a little slower...). Unfortunately mine only pertains to repetitive sounds that I find not only annoying but intensely infuriating.

Car alarms. I hear them. I hear them over every other sound. Apparently I even hear them from inside full and loud restaurants and bars with doors closed (at a recent birthday party, we were inside a packed and loud bar and I heard my friend's car alarm from outside the bar - my friends now think I'm crazy - well, crazier).

This brings me to the question: what good do car alarms even do?

Here's the thing: car alarms go off all the time and when they do, nobody does anything. Everybody just gets annoyed (especially me). Nobody actually looks to see if a car is being broken into or stolen. People who have car alarms eventually get up to see if it's their car that's making all that horrendously infuriating noise, hanging their car clicker thingy out the window to see if it will turn the alarm off. If it's not their car, they just go about their business. That's if they pay attention at all.

I have only once in my life had a car alarm. It was in a well-used red Fiat Uno in the early 1990's. I didn't know I had a car alarm and had no way of turning the damn thing off the first time it decided to go off while I was still in the car with the car running (well-used Fiat, remember). Luckily I was at our community theater where lots of semi-tech-savvy people were willing to assist. As 4 or 5 of these semi-tech savvy people tried to get the alarm to quiet itself, I finally just told them, "RIP IT OUT!" and so they did. And that was that.

In other words, car alarms are dumb. Just had to get that off my chest.