It’s Marquette. You don’t need to
turn your car alarm on!
Because of where I live and where I
work, I have the joy of hearing two or three car alarms going off
every single day. Most of them are shut down quite quickly; however,
there’s always one alarm that goes on and on and on and on and on.
It’s then that I think two things--the first is a wish that their
car battery is near death so the alarm ends soon. The second is that
it’s Marquette; do you REALLY need to turn your car alarm on?
I mean, look at the daily police log in
the Mining Journal. You see a lot of problems with public
drunkenness, 911 hang-ups, fender benders, and my personal favorite
of all time, reports of “Pomeranians walking down street wearing
sweaters”. You DON’T see a lot of reports of stolen cars or of
people breaking into vehicles. When you do hear about incidents like
that it’s because a car was left unlocked and with the keys in the
ignition. And when you do that, well, you’re just asking for
trouble. So while you may need a little sensibility when parking
your car, do you really need to set an alarm? Odds are, your car is
gonna be safe.
Really, it is.
Here, in fact, is a little proof about
that. Those of you who've read this forever may remember a little
sociology experiment I tried six or seven years ago. We had a DVD
player that died. It worked fine except for the fact that the door
that allowed you to put the disc in the machine stopped functioning.
It was a dead machine, but it looked almost brand new. So after it
died, I stuck it in the back seat of my car (yes, I had a car back
then), along with its remote, and it sat there for almost a year, in
full view of anyone walking by. And you know what?
No one took it.
If there was a rampant epidemic of car
break-ins in Marquette, you’d assume that my old DVD player
would’ve been removed from my car back then. But you know what?
It never was. It sat in the same place for almost twelve months and
not once tempted any of the miscreants that MUST be out there, at
least based on the number of car alarms that are set by people who
try to scare those miscreants off.
Of course, my experience may be
different that others. Maybe I live in a safe neighborhood; maybe I
was lucky. But remember that my car sat in my driveway for days at a
time without being moved and without anyone watching it like a hawk.
I kept it locked, but anything in it--like a dead DVD player--was out
in the open for the world to see. Yet it was never been broken into,
and nothing in it—including a DVD player—was ever stolen from it.
It’s Marquette. Do you REALLY need
to set your car alarm?
****
If you're curious, the presentation to
Rotary West went quite well yesterday. No one fell asleep, and no
one threw up. So I guess it was a winner!
8-)
No comments:
Post a Comment