There is a car alarm going off way far away. I can barely hear it. Maybe it is a mile away. It sounds like a bird chirping. When I was a kid this one guy we thought was a goofball got a car alarm. It was explained to me that if the car was broken into that a loud alarm would sound and that the kid had a pager which alert him to the break in. This is 1980 or thereabouts.
My brother Joe is a mechanical genius and he theorizes that the alarm is controlled by a motion detector of some sorts. This kid worked at the local movie theaters at the La Mirada Mall. We drive by his parked car and passenger side front and back roll down our windows and start rocking the car. Sure enough the think starts blaring out a siren. We laugh and laugh and drive around to see what happens and sure enough, the kid comes running out with two of his co-workers. We are laughing and laughing.
They go back in. We drive by a little later and do the same thing. Sirens! We drive off and back around in time to see him and one other guy from the theater walking, not running.
Yeah, i can recall announcing that the car alarm was the stupidest invention. The pager served as an irritant to the purchaser. Wouldn’t you know it, the companies got rid of the pagers and left the loud alarm to irritate everybody EXCEPT the car owner.
The birdchirp alarm has now stopped. A train is rolling by, with its sad wailing horn, perhaps a romantic sound to some but one night five years ago a train in my neighborhood tested its horn for 25 minutes straight just after 3:00 AM. All romanticism was drained from the sound. Same effect 25 seconds of a car alarm has on anyone.