So I’m at my re-encactment yesterday and get out of the welbymobile. If the door isn’t shut all the way my factory installed alarm will beep the horn a couple of times to let you know. When my alarm did that, one of my fellow re-enactors made fun of me.
“Wow. Cool alarm welby, did you get that at the Dork Store?”
Huh?
Since when can a car alarm be “cool?” I mean, I remember when the talking ones first came out, and people thought they were neat, but I thought alarm elitism was long past. Am I just out of touch?
I’m designing a car alarm that (when someone attempts to break into the car) will proclaim in a loud digitised voice “MY OWNER IS IGNORING ME! MY OWNER IS IGNORING ME!”.
Some people have to pass comment on every tiny event that occurs in their lives; your friend sounds like he may be one of these.
I used to shop in a particular grocery store. One of the employees had the most obnoxious car alarm I’ve ever encountered. The thing would flash the lights, honk the horn and then loudly exclaim three times running, “I’ve been tampered with!” After which, the lights would flash, the horn would blow and the announcement would repeat until the alarm was shut off. I suspect that other store employees would jiggle the car just to set the damn thing off since it wasn’t unusual for the thing to be in action several times a day.
There are no cool car alarms. The absolute worst are those ones that warn you to move away from the vehicle if you’re standing near it.
Excuse me? Nobody’s f*cking Lexus tells me where I can or cannot stand. If I’m walking through a parking lot or something and one of those alarms warns me, I’ll deliberately stand around until the alarm goes off, and then walk away nonchalantly
No car alarms are cool; some (like the ones that talk, IMO) just sound stupider than others. I think the honking ones are the best though; they’re probably less likely to be ignored than other alarms - you’d think someone might be in trouble/trying to get your attention, instead of ‘someone’s stupid oversensitive alarm is going off again’.
There’s one on a truck in the parking lot next to the train station that I go to. Every night after I get off the train, the mere rumbling by of the train will set off this truck’s alarm. It’s one of those honking/beeping/lights flashing alarms. I wonder how often that guy has to replace the battery in the truck. And with it going off that frequently, no one would ever notice anyone trying to steal it, especially if they did it during a freight train’s passing when the alarm wails for minutes on end. (Its absence might be noticed the next time a train went by, but it’s owner is presumably downtown somewhere, so that wouldn’t matter anyway.)
Welby, I think your friend was really trying to tell you that car alarms in general are not cool. One that paged you wouldn’t be bad, but any car alarm that a passerby can tell is going off is Not Cool and your friend was just trying to help you. Well, not really you, but all of us who have ever had to put up with someone’s car alarm going off right outside the window, or at 3am, or while we’re peacefully walking back to our car…
And sure, Ferret Herder, ones that honk instead of using another sound may have fooled their victims a decade ago, but any of those automated honks are pretty obviously mechanical and not a person and will be treated like any other car alarm by innocent bystanders. Here’s a hint for anyone who has a car alarm and thinks whatever racket it makes is going to prevent theft or damage: when your damn alarm is going off, I (and pretty much every person in the US) am annoyed by it, not interested in investigating a potential problem. If someone approaches the car and does something to it, I don’t care if they are the owner or not, since a car theif will also shut off the alarm, thereby ending the problem for me. What do you expect the people who hear your alarm to do, rush out to the defense of obnoxious-guy’s car?
