To all of you with car alarms...

I gotta tell ya, these things really piss me off. Maybe it's just a California thing, maybe it's getting to be everywhere, but I don't get it...

- They're cranked up to be WAY too sensitive. I stamp my foot fifteen feet away, the wretched thing goes off.
- The really loud ones are installed on vehicles I wouldn't pay five bucks for. If even that.
- Most of them have the "automatic off" on them - I wouldn't mind listening to them so much if I knew they were going to run the battery down...
- They go off WAY too often.
- The cops don't even pay attention to them anymore.
- Neither do the owners.

I've been listening to one on the next block going off - the damn thing's tripped something like six times in the last fifteen minutes. The owner doesn't seem to be doing anything about it, it's pointless to call the PD about it to get him to stop, and I've tried to see about getting the thing shut off before - he's actually worried that someone might steal his car! (It's a fifteen-year-old Honda. It's beat up, and I've heard it try to run. I wouldn't take it if it was given to me /gratis/!)

Frankly, if it weren't illegal for me to do so, I'd shut the damned thing off with a baseball bat whenever I'd hear one going off. These things are getting tedious. I've seen one go off not thirty feet away from a pair of cops on a coffee break - THEY DIDN'T EVEN LOOK TO SEE WHY. Not because they didn't care, but because THEY'RE burned out on the things!

Considering the general reaction (or lack thereof,) it's really pointless to put these things on vehicles. All you're going to accomplish, when you boil it right down, is pissing off your neighbours rather badly.

KNOCK IT OFF. I'm tired of it. I don't want to hear the wretched things anymore. They're a waste of perfectly good solid state electronics (and there the thing goes again. That's something like nine times in twenty minutes, now...)

The worst part about them? You get some kid with a loud exhaust that sets one off - if he doesn't have anything better to do, the damned fool will keep driving by to set the thing off. Making assault illegal as a blanket policy is doing society a disservice - there really are some people who need to be whacked upside the head once in a while to get their minds right...