This is a big problem in San Francisco, since they usually have parked their car several blocks from wherever they are now, so they don’t hear it. Are they expecting someone else to hear it and go investigate?
What I normally do is sing along.
>>Ehh! Ehh! Ehh! Ehh! Ehh! Ehh!
Boooooooweeeeeeeeeip! Booooooooweeeeeeeip!
Dooooooo-deeeeeeee Dooooooo-deeeeeee
Weeeeeooooo Weeeeeooooo Weeeeeoooo Weeeeeooooo! :||<<
Story:
A taxicab routinely parks on our street at night, right near our house. Its car alarm goes off about 3am, waking up my dad and who knows how many other people. The damn thing just keeps going and going.
Dad gets out of bed, goes downstairs and outside, pops the hood open with a prybar and yanks the battery cables out. He left a note saying “If I ever see your car on this street again, I’m going to smash every single window it has.”
The car and its alarm were never heard from again.
sniff… dabs tear
That’s… that’s just beautiful…
Not recommended (lest taxi owner turns out to be a really big guy who catches you in the act), but beautiful nontheless.
Once I became King of the World I´ll decree that all cars shall have their alarms installed inside and sound-proof windows, so only the thieves would have to cope with the godamned alarm.
You see, I´ll be a fair overlord, vote for me!
Here’s what I’ve done to my car alarms to not only make them less irritating to the community, but also make them more irritating to a car thief: I mount the siren INSIDE the car, hidden inside the dashboard. Oh, and I also deactivate the annoying ‘chirp’/chirp chirp’ lock/unlock signal; like most alarms, mine flashes the lights to let you know anyway. I have mine wired to my brake lights, so every time I set my alarm I can verify that my brake lights work, as well.
<edit:> And on preview, I see that Ale is a wise and fair King, and I welcome our new Overlord(s). 
Yay! 
Oh, ever so wise Overlor, can we install ejection seats instead?
Almost entirely silent, but sends a would be car theif into orbit.
Wait, that would require a retractable roof. … Oh heck, forget about the retractable roof. Just have the ejection seat launch them into the ceiling so they bounce up and down a few times between roof and seat making a bd-bd-bd-bd-bd-bd noise.
Nah… too complicated, a rattlesnake on the glove-compartment works fine for that; just remember not to look inside to see where does the noise come from.
A true viper security system…
wheezing with laughter
It would be worth the half-dozen bulges in the roof to see that.
You’ve got my vote. I’ve always wanted an Overlord anyway.
Most insurance companies do, and this is the source of the problem. No one does anything when a car alarm goes off, so they’re not effective as an anti-theft device. But insurance companies still offer discounts, so people have them installed (or they’re installed prior to purchase). The insurance companies can and should encourage more effective (and less annoying) anti-theft devices, like kill switches or LoJack-type devices.
Personally, when I hear a car alarm go off, I hope it’s a thief, as I figure they actually know how to turn off the alarm, unlike the car’s owner.
Overlords can be a good thing. 
A few years ago, the powers that be in our fair city saw to it that repeat car alarm offenders may be fined for for their racket. It’s doesn’t stop all of them but it seems to help.
A few years before that, I lived across the street from a parking garage. One morning. I was greeted with Honk! Honk! Honk! Honk! Honk! ad nauseum. This continued all day long until the car’s owner finished working at whatever 9-to-5 job he or she worked at and came to drive the wretched thing home. Now, my guess is that if a thief isn’t going to stick around when one of those alarms goes off so why in the world would you need one that would still be going 81/2 hours later? Besides, I don’t think a thief set it off. It was just a very busy traffic area with lots of trucks going by. Hopefully, a garage attendant or someone else left a note on the car that suitably embarrassed the owner. At any rate, it never happened again.
In all fairness, folks, it can happen accidentally.
A few months ago, I flew up to Maine to visit some very dear friends. It was after midnight; we’d hot tubbed and B and I were hanging out on the sofa bed in the living room talking before I turned in. That’s when we heard their car alarm. B got up and turned it off and we went back to talking. It went off again. This time his wife turned it off. To make a long story short, it kept going off until finally they called AAA to disconnect the battery before their neighbors or they came up with a more -er- permanent solution. I believe in being a good guest; I knew how embarassed my friends were, but even so, I have this curious habit of sleeping at night, and these people have that most miraculous of objects, a comfortable sofa bed. We took the car to the dealership the next day and determined the source of this problem.
The moral of this story:
Never, ever leave a Subaru electronic keyring in your pants when you put them through the washing machine. Apparently B had washed his key ring, causing a short, which caused the car alarm which wouldn’t stop. :eek:
CJ
The scene: Pullins are on vacation, overnighting while on a 2-day drive to the beach. Unloading our luggage in the parking lot, we have offended the garishly decorated truck next to us. It repeatedly announces that we are invading its personal space and it wants us to move away (it says this over and over and over…). It apparently can remotely summon its owner who comes racing down the stairs, across the parking lot and demands to know if any of us have “touched his truck”. (!!)
At this point I’m getting annoyed, so I ask him if he has two teenaged boys, as I saw them trying to enter the driver’s side door (I’m making this part up). “NO” he exclaims, so I tell him they ran “over there” (gesturing toward the highway). He angrily stomps “over there” (what, he’s looking for evidence?), casts around for awhile, and eventually returns to his room.
Now the fun begins. Pullin grabs the 2 cans of tennis balls he remembers were in the back of the car. We retire to our room (which overlooks the parking lot and the precious vehicle). A decent throw will bounce off the truck roof and into the bushes (out of sight), but is enough to send the truck into hysterics and bring the owner racing on to the parking lot.
I stayed up late that night.
He did too.
My hometown banned those damned alarms because they’re useless and annoying. Other towns should follow suit, and a LOT have.
Try petitioning to have loud alarms banned, or at the very least restricted (no louder than 100db, lasting no longer than 30 seconds, etc). If people object, point out that no one pays attention to a car alarm anymore, they disturb the peace, and that there are MUCH better devices available. If you already have such a law, push for better enforcement backed by stiff penalties ($1,000 for the first offense, $5,000 thereafter).
I had one of those annoying cars where the alarm went off randomly 
But at least it would shut off after a couple of minutes. So I took it to the dealer and told them to just disconnect the damn thing (I have never liked car alarms but it came with the car). They said “No, No let us fix it. It’s such a great feature” :rolleyes: So I come back after lunch and unfortuntely it turns out it was a bad sensor which is out of stock, but the part is ordered and they can fix it in a matter of minutes and they’ve temporarily disconnected the alarm and I should bring it back in a week…I never brought the car back. The cool thing is the red alarm is set thingie hanging from the rear-view mirror still lights up and blinkies when I lock the car even though there is no alarm anymore, hehehe. I am sooooooo fooling the car thieves.
Once upon a time, I lived in a second-floor apartment across from a church. I thought it would be a nice quiet neighborhood, you know?
It was, most of the time. The only real problem was on Sunday mornings.
Y’see, my apartment had no parking lot. There was a sign on the sidewalk that said NO PARKING EXCEPT FOR APARTMENT TENANTS, and so the eight of us who lived in this particular building simply parked on the street, no sweatski.
Except on Sunday mornings. And even then, it wasn’t EVERY Sunday morning.
But it was pretty much a done deal that one weekend per month, minimum, Big Rollo, who lived in 2A, would have met the love of his life in some bar the previous Saturday night, and was out having breakfast with her as of Sunday morning.
…and if there was a vacant parking spot in front of the apartment building, some churchgoer would take it. Guaranteed. The landlord never did a thing about it.
Now, this usually wasn’t any big deal, at least to me. Most Sunday mornings, I was either in bed (which meant my car was parked securely in front of the place) or elsewhere (in which case I didn’t need the parking spot, now, did I?)
…until The Time Of The Cutlass.Cutlass Supreme, a hideous green color.
Now, if you know anything about the Cutlass, you know it’s a pretty good sized car. BIG car. And it has battery power to burn. And this jackass had put a car alarm in there that could have put some public address systems to shame.
And he was a very religious chappie. In church, every Sunday, rain or shine.
I got to know his car alarm very well. Most Sundays, it would be in the main parking lot, on the other side of the church from me… and I could still hear the &%$# thing. "WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP! OORT! OORT OORT! OORT FaaaaaZOOP! FaaaaaZOOP! FaaaaaaZOOP FaaaaaaZOOP! ERNK! ERNK! ERNK! ERNK! WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP!
…and so on, ad infinitum. This could go on for quite some time, since he apparently disapproved of disrupting a church service simply to go turn his car alarm off. I never actually set foot in the church, but if they could hold services with that thing blasting outside, I can only imagine that it must have doubled as a bomb shelter, complete with inch-thick bulletproof stained glass. I mean, I could hear the stinkin’ thing clearly, with the CHURCH BETWEEN ME AND IT!!!
You can imagine my reaction when the &%$#@ thing went off no more than forty feet from my head while I was sound asleep. Well, actually, you probably can’t. I didn’t quite bounce off the ceiling, but I do remember landing on the floor on my hands and feet, which would seem to imply that I’d left the bed at some previous point, and judging from the impact, I’d guess I was airborne for a second, there. The cats were quivering spiky balls of fur, jammed as far under the bed as they could get. My windows were open, you see; the weather had been nice, and I thought I’d save money on air conditioning. My mistake. He was parked right under my window.
“WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP! OORT! OORT OORT! OORT FaaaaaZOOP! FaaaaaZOOP! FaaaaaaZOOP FaaaaaaZOOP! ERNK! ERNK! ERNK! ERNK! WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP!”
Luckily, church was about over. The owner found me standing beside his car, hastily dressed, no more than ten minutes after the alarm began going off. I was studying the car, trying to figure out how I could get in and shut the alarm off without damaging the vehicle and/or risking arrest. Naturally, he gave me a funny look and asked what I thought I was doing, staring at his car.
“See that window up there?” I pointed. “That is where I live. Your car woke me out of a sound sleep, ten minutes ago.”
“Well!” he remarked briskly. “Honest man has no business being in bed of this hour of a Sunday morning!”
And then he got in his car and drove away, while I stood there with my mouth hanging open, thinking, If I believed that officious little asshole actually SAID that to me, I would certainly have ripped his pointy little head off before he’d actually gotten into the car…
Life went on. The following Sunday, the Cutlass was elsewhere, and I don’t think the alarm went off at all. I forgot about Mr. Supreme and the Car That Screamed Like The Damned.
Until a couple of weeks later, that is. I found out later he liked parking in front of my building because it was parallel parking… no one to open their car door and scratch his precious paint job.
This time, it went on for a good twenty minutes. I waited fifteen, then got dressed and went down with a crowbar, fully intending to rip the car apart. I got out the front of the building just as he killed the sound. He looked at me funny. “What’s YOUR problem?”
“Do you realize that car has been howling away for twenty minutes?” I said.
“Sorry,” he remarked, getting into the car.
“Do you realize you are parked in a zone restricted to residents of this apartment complex?”
He looked at the sign right next to his car, as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh,” he said. And then he drove away. At least he had the grace to look a little embarrassed.
I called the landlord, who lived thirty miles away, and agreed that the next time this guy pulled this stunt, I should just call the landlord, who would gleefully rise from his bed as of a Sunday morning, drive thirty miles, and examine the situation for himself. If it was as bad as I said, then certainly, he would have the fellow towed.
I hung up quite aware that nothing was going to be done.
The next time it happened, I put a sign on his windshield.
You are parked in a restricted zone.
Your car alarm is disturbing residents of this apartment complex.
The next time you park here, if your alarm disturbs anyone, your
car will be violently vandalized.
…and I figured that’d be the end of it. I mean, it sure would have been if it was MY car.
Nope. Two weeks later, it happened again. This time, he was ready for me, though. As I came roaring out the front door, crowbar in hand, he was standing there with a well-dressed gentleman who confronted me, flashed a badge, and explained that it was not within my rights to destroy someone’s property simply because I found it annoying.
“And yet it’s within HIS rights to park on private property?” I snarled.
“The owner of the property has made no complaint.”
Meanwhile, the howling and screaming of the car continued, while Mr. Supreme diddled with his dinkus, trying to make it be quiet. I think, at that point, I came closer to assaulting an officer…
…and finally, the car shut up. And there was blessed silence. And suddenly, I knew what to do.
“You’re quite right, officer,” I said. “What was I thinking? You’re absolutely right. I have no right to smash every exposed piece of glass on that car.”
Mr. Supreme’s head jerked up.
“I mean, just because he’s made it clear I can’t sleep in of a morning in my own apartment, I can’t just slash all his tires.”
Mr. Supreme made an unpleasant facial expression. I heard the door open behind me, as my next-door neighbor came out to see what the hassle was. I noticed he had a baseball bat in his hand.
“And I certainly have no right to go dumping a five-pound bag of sugar in his gas tank, just because he lacks any consideration for the people who live here.”
“Are you threatening me?” said Mr. Supreme, with a weird cross of anger and nervousness on his face.
“Son, those are some serious offenses you’re looking at,” said the officer, who I suddenly realized was dressed for church. He was a friend of Mr. Supreme’s, apparently.
“And that’s why I’d never dream of doing any of them,” I said sweetly. “Even though I can’t sleep in whenever he feels like parking under my window. Even though he’s not supposed to be parking there in the first place. And I’m sure I’d never get angry enough to consider violating the law, no matter what kind of inconsiderate bastard he is.”
Mr. Supreme’s mouth opened… and closed again. The officer looked at me funny. “Son, are you trying to be funny?”
“Not in the least, officer. Is there anything else I can do for you?” And I gave Mr. Supreme my best Rasputin-The-Mad-Monk loony grin, over the officer’s shoulder.
I had to put up with a brief lecture from the cop about making threats, but no action was taken. I was also informed that if anything were ever to happen to Mr. Supreme’s car, I would certainly be the number one suspect.
But you know what? Mr. Supreme never parked the Cutlass there again.
Sometimes, it DOES pay to be reasonable…
I’ve always wanted to buy one of those sound activated popcans/christmas trees/santa etc…
Find a vehicle with a motion sensor, place sound activated toy next to it, and clap my hands.
Toy begins to dance, the security system notices it, and tells it to move away from the vehicle. This triggers more dancing. Wheee…
I wonder how many batteries I would have to replace in the toy before the car battery was drained?
One of the reasons I love my apartment complex is that they fine you if your car alarm goes off when your car is not being stolen.
And the fine doubles every time your alarm goes off.
The result of this is that I very rarely hear car alarms in my parking lot.