I got up this morning with about 15 minutes to spare before I had to leave for work. My fault for swatting the snooze button so many times, but I ran into a few friends online whom I hadn’t seen in a long time and so I stayed up too late to catch up.

So I was not entirely awake when I headed into the garage and opened the door to the car. I’m not sure what exactly happened. Maybe I hit a button somewhere, I don’t know. All I know is suddenly I’m reeling from the very loud honking that is emitting from my car because the alarm went off!

When I bought this car, it had a basic security system in place. Nothing fancy – just a panic button on the remote, and a dire warning that if I lock it with the remote and anyone should try to open the car from the outside without unlocking it, the horn will blare.

I suppose I should feel relieved to know that it works. But this morning all I could think about was that:

1. I had no idea how to turn the darn thing off!

2. My neighbors were probably going to kill me for blaring a horn at 7am.

In retrospect, it’s amusing. Me frantically pressing random buttons on the car remote, dashing into the house to grab the spare and pressing random buttons on that, trying to start the car to see if that would do the trick (it didn’t), flipping hastily through the manual to see if it mentions anything in there (it doesn’t). Eventually the honking stopped. I’m not sure if it’s because I managed to do something, or if it just ran its course.

And it’s such a lovely testament to the effectiveness of these car alarms that make noise. As I reopened my garage door and pulled out onto the street, no one was there. No one had even bothered to come out to see.