Knock, don’t honk

There are happy ways to wake up in the morning: the sound of a cheery CD in the alarm clock, a dog that knows when it's time to strap on the feed bag or a better half that hits the shower before you do.

Unhappy ways to wake up include the 5 a.m. wrong-number phone call, the cat using your face as a springboard and, most of all, a honking car horn coming from the neighbor's driveway.

Not just any honk, but the deliberate and equally irritating honking of someone who thinks that it's an acceptable way to get your tool-borrowing-and-never-returning-it neighbor out of the house for the morning carpool commute.

Yes, the horn, among all its misuses, has become a substitute for actually getting out of the vehicle and ringing the doorbell.

There even seems to be a primitive dialect that comes with it. The light "toot-too" at 6:45 a.m. means that all is well and there's no rush. The neighbor in the house has extra time to actually do up the tie or down a quick cup of coffee while checking out the hot morning headlines in this newspaper. The short, single "hoooonk" at 6:55 a.m. means that it's time to get rolling, so the neighbor's shoes had better be laced up and his jacket in hand. And then there's the long and really aggravating single "hoooooooooooooooonk" at 7:05 that signals that the driver is late, perhaps due to a long lineup at the drive-thru coffee bar or staying up too late the night before watching the shopping network. In this case, if the neighbor is not standing on the curb with one hand out to catch the door handle, he'll be taking a cab to work.

Since the horn was actually put in the car as an emergency warning device and everyone who holds a valid driver's licence knows this, one would assume that life at the office must be fraught with all kinds of impending disasters, certainly to warrant pulling into a sleepy suburban neighborhood -- one in which the driver doesn't even live -- and proceed to wake perfect strangers from deep sleep at a time when roosters still have morning breath.

Of course, that's more than a little sarcastic, but you get the point. Too bad the horn-honkers, who obviously don't realize there's anyone else in the world but themselves, don't.

Perhaps they should clue in because many neighborhoods have bylaws intended to deter excessive noise at abnormal hours, because -- and this might strike the car honkers out there as surprising -- the bulk of the people in residential areas are actually asleep at night. Yes, really, so take the look of surprise off your face.

So, does that then make it OK to roll into a neighborhood and lay on the horn, even in the middle of the day, so your buddy knows there's a tee time with your names on it?

Margo, the nice woman who lives downstairs, isn't a big fan. Late afternoon is the time her little ones take their naps. Anyone who has spent the better part of day trying to get a couple of wound-up kids calmed down enough to actually sleep could really do without some thoughtless lunkhead waking them up with a horn.

It's either ignorance, selfishness or plain old laziness that perpetuates using the car horn for everything other than its intended purpose ... whatever that might be. It's so misused, in fact, it might be a good idea to altogether remove horns from cars since the practical purpose eludes such a huge segment of the driving population.

The "alarm horn" is the last straw in my books.

If you're in the neighborhood to pick up someone, do everyone around you a favor: Get out of the car and knock on the door. Or, get on the cell phone -- finally, a good use for this scourge of modern society -- and call them out. But please do not, under any circumstances, be so inconsiderate as to use the horn to get the attention of the person you're intending to summon ... and everyone else within a 10-house radius. Oh, yes, and I mean cab drivers, too, who routinely lay on the horn in my neighborhood to pick up their fares.

Since many drivers do not realize -- or don't care -- that this needlessly affects others around them, I think it's our job to tell them, either to their faces, with this column or in an eye-for-an-eye tactic with our horns. Perhaps one long honk would be the perfect wakeup call.

Rhonda Wheeler is a journalist with Wheelbase Communications, a worldwide supplier of automotive news, features and reviews. You can e-mail her by logging on to www.wheelbase.ws/mailbag.html.