Maddening ‘safety’ features

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I bought my current car when I was expecting Little One, and she recently had her 9th birthday. The car is still going well, but it did have a couple of annoying attributes, which of course were probably originally marketed as bonus features! The first is a reversing warning. There are several sensors in the rear bumper and originally these would beep with increasing frequency as the car approached some obstacle at the rear. This was annoying on two counts - one, when parallel parking, because it made so much frenetic noise it would make the driver think they were so close to something they were about to hit it - then when they got out they would find they were actually several feet away and had just left a ridiculously large space completely unnecessarily (which of course reduces the amount of parking space available for others). Apart from this, it was triggered by the fence beside our driveway, so as I reversed out of our drive the alarm would beep continuously which was so maddening it would induce me to reverse out as fast as possible so as to end the torture - I was really afraid that I would go shooting out and mow down some unfortunate passing pedestrian in my rush to stop the awful noise! Thankfully after a while I went to get a new tyre and there I found a couple of helpful mechanics with time to spare. They traced the source of the noise (which involved some hilarious reversing manoeuvres while they pressed their ears to various parts of the car’s interior!) and disconnected the wires. What a relief! I was so grateful and pleased with this improvement that I drove off happily with a big smile on my face and didn’t think until afterwards of asking for help with feature number two - and then I was too embarrassed to turn around and go back again. So ever since then I have been stuck with maddening ‘safety’ feature number two - which will have to be my next post as this one is getting too long already… All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2021.