An Alarming Situation

I drove to a local shopping center for lunch today. As I parked my car and walked, I heard a fire alarm going off. So I went inside and got a burrito at Chipotle.

Do fire alarms actually have a point? I mean, a smoke detector could be useful if a fire breaks out while you're asleep. But when a fire alarm goes off at a shopping center, certain assessments are made before running for the door:
1. Is there smoke to be seen anywhere?
2. Are there people screaming and running away?

Invariably, the answer is "no," which is why I proceeded to walk into the building where the alarm was telling me to "exit the building."

Perhaps one day, this will kill me along with all the other skeptical people at Chipotle.

Fire alarms, however, are useful for cutting lectures short in school. If you're sitting in a lecture hall, you can't tell if the other side of the building is on fire, so everyone has to evacuate. I used to rejoice on the rare occasions that the fire alarm would go off in the middle of a dreary lecture.

One time, someone set off the fire alarm at a building to attempt to force the professor to reschedule an exam. That didn't go particularly well because everyone just had less time to complete the test.

Vehicle theft alarms fall into the same category. I hear them go off more often than fire alarms, but never because the car was actually being stolen.

Statistics show that on average, there are just over 500,000 structure fires in a year, and about 1.2 million cars stolen per year in the U.S. In other words, one is about twice as likely to have his car stolen than be in a building that is on fire.

However, I come across a car alarm going off about once or twice a week, as opposed to once or twice a year in the case of fire alarms. Now, some of this is inevitably due to user error. I know I've set off the alarm of my car by accident several times, but I stop it right away. Sometimes, though, you come across the alarms that go off for a minute or two, stop, then go off again. And again. And again. And again.

This is particularly annoying if you're in your car in a parking garage trying to catch a brief nap before your next class. Feelings of violence and hatred are normal.

Car alarms have so many false positives that I don't even look in the direction of the alarm anymore.

I'm actually not sure what the point of this post is anymore, so I'm going to stop.