Alarmism

[xela]

When I got home a few minutes ago, I was grabbing my stuff out of the back, not paying much attention to the keyring in my other hand, when I accidentally set off my car alarm. Only two bleats before I found the damned button (on purpose this time!) to shut the thing off, and I didn't see any lights come on at the neighbors, so I'm hoping I didn't disturb anyone's sleep.

Every time a car alarm mine has gone off, it's been a false alarm. Every time I've heard a car alarm, and been able to determine (or unable to avoid determining!) which car was making the noise, it's been a false alarm. Next time I buy a car, I'm absolutely making them show me only cars in which I can disable the alarm, and where they'll show me how. (The salesman lied to me about this one having an alarm. What I get for believing a salesman. (Well, and for giving away what answer I wanted.))

Car alarms have been the butt of jokes pretty much as long as they've been common. They're so useless — and have always been so useless — that I find myself wondering if they weren't a necessary prerequisite to the TSA. If Americans hadn't grown used, over the preceding 20 years, to the most conspicuous example of "security" in their lives being something that generated a lot of inconvenience for no good purpose, would we ever have accepted the TSA?

Comments

[sammason.livejournal.com]

Yes car alarms are useless. Did anybody ever go to the car whose alarm was going off, interrupt a crime in progress, and take useful action about the crime? I think not. Perhaps a few crims may have run away when a car alarm sounded. Perhaps. I do know that I've been woken, and kept awake, by neighbours' bloody car alarms.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

I have had car alarms help, several times.

In particular, if someone is breaking into your work truck because of all those tasty easily-fenced tools that are likely to be inside and the car alarm goes off, they will just grab what's easily available and run for it instead of actually taking their time and grabbing all your expensive tools out of the gang box in the back of the truck.

Now, I don't have a work truck so I don't park a truck full of tools in sketchy neighborhoods, so I don't have a car alarm.

[siderea]

True story! I was at a party a couple years ago, when a car alarm went off behind the house. Someone came in to bring this to our attention, and ask if it belonged to any of us.

As it happened, one guy, K, who was quite the raconteur, had been telling us a story which culminated in his getting a new Jeep. "Hey, K," someone asked, "Does your new car have a car alarm?" "No, I didn't get that option."

You can see where this is going: somebody finally comes in, and announces, "It's a black Jeep with license plate number AAAXXX", and he's, "Well CRAP." Not only didn't he know he had an alarm, it's not like anybody'd shown him how to turn it off. Good times.

[eccentrific.livejournal.com]

I believe all cars with alarms have a "valet mode", which is a way to disable them. My car had an alarm, but I disabled it this way pretty early on and never re-enabled it.

[kareila]

We did that too, until this one time the battery died and when it was juiced back up, the car was realarmed with no easy way to turn it back off. Sigh...

[cfox.livejournal.com]

Of course the car alarm is useful. When you don't know where the garage parked it (post-service) you can press the panic button to locate your car.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Alright, your use-case makes sense. But the value of an alarm in that case is diminished by the fact that so many people have developed the habit of ignoring car alarms, because there are so many bogus ones.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the comments on this post will give the issue sufficient mindshare that pop into the forefront of my consciousness sometime when I am in the car and have a few minutes to RT (grossly inadequately indexed) FM, so I can do just that.... :)

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Heh. I've never had that happen --- but at least once or twice a year, I leave someplace and go "Oh, crap --- where did I park?" And it had never occurred to me (dawn, meet Marblehead) before that the panic button would be useful in this circumstance.... Now I have a reason to think about not disabling the damned thing, if I ever get around to RTFMing how to.