Don't leave your unlocked car running and then wonder why it gets stolen

Back to the OP …

Every once in a while, you hear about a missing child or dog … that was in the car when the driver/parent/owner ran ‘briefly’ into the convenience store to buy a pack of smokes or something.

If it should be obvious not to leave your car running when you step away, we need a better word (than ‘obvious’) to describe doing it with a child or a pet still inside.

They’re heartbreaking stories, but …

“I never saw so many bleedin’ aerials. They said they could detect a running car at four hundred yards.”

I see this as yet another form of special taxation:

  • Leave your car running in a dodgy neighborhood and be surprised when someone hops in and drives away? This is a tax on idiocy.

  • Lots of speeding or parking tickets? This is a tax on those who are in a hurry / impatient.

  • The lottery? A tax on those who don’t understand probabilities, often simplified to “a tax on those who can’t do math”

I was listening to radio episodes of “Fibber McGee and Molly” from the 1940s and a few episodes had a similar PSA.

At my old employer, 6 parking tickets on hospital grounds was in itself grounds for dismissal. Some people did make jokes about getting fired for parking tickets, but think about it - parking in a restricted space for which one wasn’t authorized, and getting caught SIX TIMES, would be indicative of other issues.

One of my college roommates sometimes drove to campus, and if she parked at a meter, would usually put 50 minutes’ worth of change in it, the exact length of her class, and then wondered why she would get a ticket. D’oh! Put a few extra minutes’ worth of time on it.

This happened to my dad, he dropped my mom off at work not realizing that she had the fob to the car he was driving and he had the other set of keys in his pocket. Stopping at a store on the way home was the wrong move that day.

I like it… parking ticket “tax” because of math issues, not necessarily impatience.

Ha! You obviously don’t live in Wisconsin. :slight_smile:

ETA: that post was five years ago — never mind

To be fair, I still don’t live in Wisconsin.

Heh heh