By Chris Cosci

Cars have been around since the late 1800s. Car thieves didn't come around until many years later. After all, it was tough to make a quick getaway in a car that could be outpaced by the average jogger.

But car theft was inevitable. It was also inevitable that somebody would come up with a clever device to prevent cars from being stolen. We tend to use safes to protect our valuable possessions, but car-sized safes would probably be a little bulky. They would also be pretty hard to conceal behind the artwork in your living room.

Actually, the car-sized safe does exist: it's called a garage. The first garage was probably an old barn that was converted after horses became obsolete. It seems like an ideal solution, but most garages aren't used for cars anymore. Many people use garages as workshops, game zones, or king-size storage closets.

But even if people did use them, garages still couldn't protect your car if you were away from home. After all, garages have this impractical tendency to not be very portable. So, something was needed to protect cars in public areas.

And thus was born the car alarm. It was a stroke of brilliance. Simply attach a gadget to the car that would emit a loud, ear-piercing sound whenever the car was opened improperly. The would-be thief, terrified by the attention-inducing alarm, would run away and leave the car alone. Another car theft prevented.

But there's just one little problem: nothing else happens. Once the alarm starts beeping, it just keeps going until the owner returns and shuts it off. The police don't arrive at the scene. Nobody is contacted about the alarm. Everyone just ignores it.

Why? Because car alarms are never set off by thieves. Thieves are too smart to go near a car with an alarm in it. Roughly 90% of the time, car alarms are set off by the car's owner, who hasn't quite figured out how to work the complicated system of buttons on their specialized key chains. The other 10% of car alarms are set off because of over-sensitive systems that can be set off by somebody breathing on the car.

Basically, car alarms have become like the boy who cried wolf. If you ever called the police and told them a car alarm was going off, they'd probably just put you on hold and start laughing hysterically. Nobody takes car alarms seriously. But somehow, that hasn't stopped people from coming up with new ideas for car alarms.

At some point, somebody decided that the standard alarm wasn't making enough noise to bother people. So a bunch of people got together and came up with a whole bunch of different sounds, including a whooping siren and a buzzing noise like a busy signal. But instead of offering them as separate options, they combined all of these sounds into one, collective alarm package. And because a car alarm tends to go off every ten minutes in any given parking lot, many people have memorized the order of the sounds and can recite them as the alarm rings out. It's like singing along to the Oscar Meyer wiener song - it's part of our pop culture.

Occasionally, one of these alarms will go off, and there won't be another person around within a 50-mile radius. So the alarm just keeps ringing, endlessly cycling through the various melodies. It's enough to drive a person crazy, perhaps even to violence. And from violence stems criminal activity - like car theft, for example. And the circle of life continues.