I don’t like car alarms.

Mainly it’s a matter of “crying wolf.” They go off for the stupidest reasons and don’t signify an attempted theft, so everyone ignores them. I can imagine a lot of cars have been broken into or stolen despite the alarm because people heard it and assumed it was just the usual pointless squealing.

Last night was worse. At about 12:40 AM, we were woken up by a car alarm in the parking lot, echoing between our building and the next. Figuring the owner would get down there to turn it off, we waited it out. After 5-10 minutes I figured they’d had plenty of time to throw on a robe, walk outside and deal with it. This qualified as Disturbing the Peace.

I was ready to do something I had never done before: call the cops on my neighbors. (Not that I knew which neighbors it was, but I figured they could work it out from which space the blaring car was in.) The only reason I didn’t was that it took me so long to find the non-emergency number that they had finally turned the damn thing off by the time I was ready to pick up the phone.

Hey, I didn’t want to call 911 – that would’ve just added sirens to the mix.

To top it off, every few minutes from then until 1:30 I would hear the “bleep bleep” of someone turning an alarm on and off. Just enough to knock me out of half-sleep.