Random car noises

Joe and I are no strangers to random noise-making behavior exhibited by cars. Joe's car, for instance, vigorously protests being left out in the rain by emitting loud, insistent honks during downpours, usually at a convenient time such as 2 a.m. But even this experience did not prepare us for the noises that accompanied our recent brief driving episode in a luxury car.

As noted in the previous blog post, the driver's door on my brother and sister-in-law's car does not lock -- or if it does, we certainly never figured out how. There is, however, an alarm on the car, which we discovered by accident when we were trying to coax the door to lock. Suddenly we were announcing to an entire parking lot of people that a) we had no idea how to work this car and b) we may have been breaking into it.

In desperation I pushed the lock button on the remote, and the alarm instantly stopped. I opened the car door again to see if it was locked, the alarm went off, and I pushed the lock button again. The alarm stopped. This instantaneous result gave me such a heady feeling of power -- I have watched numerous strangers in parking lots frantically trying to convince their cars to stop beeping and honking, to no avail -- that I kept deliberately setting off the alarm just so I could experience this heady feeling of power over and over again.

Eventually we stopped playing with the alarm and drove off. Halfway to our destination, we were startled by yet another loud noise: the radar detector. My brother's usual response to this intrusion is to push something to make the loud, insistent beeps stop. But without him I dared not touch anything, lest it not work when next he or my sister-in-law drove the car. So we drove on, ignoring the fact that we could not hear each other talk, the radar detector frantically beeping whenever we approached a suspicious vehicle, like a garbage truck.

We were of the opinion that what would be much more helpful than a radar detector would be to have a Starbucks detector. As we were unfamiliar with the location of Starbucks in the area where we were driving, this would have been very useful. Such a device would automatically detect any Starbucks within 50 miles and change the car's course to get to the nearest one. When the car approached a Starbucks it would emit something like "Whoo-EEE! Whoo-EEE! Approaching a Starbucks institution on the left, 50 yards." The alarm would get louder and more insistent the closer you got, and when the car came to the driveway of Starbucks, it would, independent of the driver, make a sharp turn into the parking lot, and neatly deposit all passengers right in front of the door.

Of course certain details would have to be worked out before such a device could be implemented. Like which sound would take precedence when the car alarm, radar detector, and Starbucks detector are all going off at the same time. I know which one has my vote.