January 17th, 2008
#423 - Funnel
We have tornado sirens scattered around my town. They test them on the first Tuesday of the month at 10am. Back in high school I almost had a heart attack during one of the tests. It turns out that that there was a siren mounted on the school directly above my classroom. It took me a few moments to figure out what was going on and that the sound was not from an airplane about crash through the window.
January 17th, 2008 at 12:09 am
that doesn’t sound even a little bit fun.
i hate loud noises.
we don’t get tornadoes in the mountains usually, although we did have warning for one last fall. im pretty sure we lost power, but nothing else.
January 17th, 2008 at 12:21 am
Nothing says “Wake up!!” like a liquefied brain. =)
January 17th, 2008 at 12:27 am
One day I was driving home during a heavy storm, and I didn’t realize until later that I had driven right by a tornado. It was less than a mile away from me.
January 17th, 2008 at 12:28 am
Damn, I’d hate to have to deal with something like that every month… It’s bad enough I have to endure fire alarm testing in my apartment building every half-year!
The Duck Has Spoken.
January 17th, 2008 at 1:18 am
Man, I can sleep through rather loud noises.
January 17th, 2008 at 1:55 am
Good thing there ain’t any tornados here =p
And wow.That’s one heck of an alarm clock o_o
January 17th, 2008 at 2:06 am
Heh!
Growing up, the sirens were mostly used to call out the Vounteer Fire Company. You always knew someone was having a Real Bad Day when they moaned up into life.
As for noises, and sleep - I was a submariner and quickly learned to parse noises in my sleep. I could sleep right through various noises, evolutions, alarms and announcements, so long as they didn’t apply to me. OTOH, the Lee Helmsman whispering my name at the hatch would have me on my feet and in my boots before I was fully awake.
January 17th, 2008 at 4:22 am
I live in on the second floor of an apartment building and one morning I was using a new alarm clock I had not tested. It sounded just like a truck’s back-up beeper. I shot straight up and was wide awake wondering how a truck got in my apartment. The next morning I was right back to playing with the snooze alarm until I had just enough time to get to work.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:24 am
OTOH??? What OTOH mean???
January 17th, 2008 at 8:34 am
On the other hand
January 17th, 2008 at 8:36 am
first Monday of the month, 12 O clock, alarm test all through the country, if they ever invade Holland they’ll do it during those tests.
January 17th, 2008 at 9:19 am
My alarm clock is annoying. I never use it. Ever. It wakes me up with the high pitched beeping noise that Olz described as sounding like a trucks back up beeper. I hate it so much!
luckily, I never use it. My mom wakes me up…
January 17th, 2008 at 9:50 am
We had a panic in the small town that I grew up in when the tornado test didn’t go off when it should. Everyone assumed that this meant that there was actually a tornado and everyone panicked, apparently they were doing repairs…go figure!
January 17th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Back home I lived in a town that did the same thing. There was a huge storm brewing on the day they’re usually tested so when they went off it was like the boy who cried wolf. Then the wolf (storm) smacked us in the face and we realized it wasn’t a drill. Never gonna forget that one, a whole tree fell in our yard!
January 17th, 2008 at 10:21 am
Eh, I used to live right across the street from a Volunteer fire department. They use the same sirens for those, as a tornado siren. THe difference is, is instead of going off once a month, it was whenever the VFD was needed for something. So it was a good 7-10 times a week at random
January 17th, 2008 at 10:51 am
I don’t like anything that disturbs my sleep.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:08 am
i can’t stand the sound the radio makes when they have an amber alert - especially when it’s late at night or something. i get so paranoid o_o
January 17th, 2008 at 11:24 am
We don’t normally get tornadoes around here, but we do have something else to use those warning sirens on: chemical alerts. There’s a tone of chemical plants near here, so they’ve got to test the alarms every week. It’s actually gotten to the point where I don’t notice them anymore.
January 17th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
I have such a loud alarm clock that it annoys the crap out of people above my connected bathroom. Yet, if I’ve gotten much less than 8 hours of sleep, I keep snoozing or get confused and shut it off entirely. I had to put a hinged cover over the off button to keep that confused or lazy version of myself from turning it off. At least, I like to think about my lazy, unawake self as a different person. I’ve found that it takes sunlight and music (scheduler on foobar2000) to get me up.
January 17th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
We have no tornado sirens.
January 17th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Omygosh, I remember last year on the way to school I saw these tiny tornados up in the sky. There were three of them and so high in the sky I thought I was imagining things coz I didn’t know they could do that!
pfft.
January 17th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
nope, no tornadoes over here in the far northeast…the town where i used to live though was basically surrounded by wetlands though, so they would test the flood alarms periodically. however, it was so long ago that i don’t remember how often or even what they sounded like.
January 17th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
I install the sirens… i hope you don’t have to hear them.. if you do… look out..
January 17th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
I saw a tornado once. North of Toronto, but I forget which town it was. We were driving along, and I looked out the window. There, less than a kilometer away, was a narrow funnel cloud moving along the edge of a subdivision.
It was fairly free of debris, so either it was really weak, or it never touched down. Either way, it was REALLY cool
The Duck Has Spoken.
January 17th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Hah, it looks great man I’ve not yet seen a tornado or seen an alarm but I’ll be sure to think of this while running for my life.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
We have a siren here in town that screams when we either have a fire going on or a tornado/really bad storm coming around. I used to live in a house not far from it and this past summer we had an bad outbreak of fires on farmland in the general area that was done by an arsonist. Needless to say, I wanted to severely damage the arsonist but he was never found. *Sigh* BTW, I love this bit in the commentary: “It took me a few moments to figure out what was going on and that the sound was not from an airplane about crash through the window.” That’s hilarious.
January 18th, 2008 at 9:54 am
*chuckles*
January 18th, 2008 at 10:33 am
I used to require a fire alarm to wake me up. I think my neighbours hated me, specially the weekend i went away and forgot to turn it off.
January 18th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Yeah, we have those in my city, too. They are kind of annoying, but you really appreciate them when they go off for real, which has happened a few times.
January 19th, 2008 at 9:31 am
There exists only one alarm that I hate
and that is the nuclear sirens O_O
January 21st, 2008 at 10:18 pm
The closest thing to a tornado I’ve ever seen was this wicked huge dust tornado thing one day on a sunny day. We were playing a game and kicking up dust and then I guess the conditions were right and it made this like giant dust tornado. It sounds a lot less cool than it actually was…but anyway. Man I’m terrible in the morning…even that thing might not fully wake me up, lol. I’d figure out how to shut it off, roll over and drift off again.
February 11th, 2008 at 12:35 am
The one thing I hate is those damned modified 747 that fly in from Japan with parts to assemble the 787 at the nearby Boeing plants.
Why are they damned?
They wake everyone up by flying too close to my house. I condemn thee for awaking the dead!
July 15th, 2008 at 8:31 am
A vibration louder than 200 decibel actually counts as a blastwave rather than a soundwave. I bet thoughts like these are what passes through Biff’s head at the moment, along with his eardrums.