The whistle

A friend called me recently. I was just coming from the hospital from a check-up (don’t worry, nothing bad) and he caught me on the way to the parking lot. Now my car isn’t brand new, but it’s not old either, so it has a Bluetooth interface, which allows phone calls while I’m driving – especially since the whole thing works with voice control. When the ignition is turned on, the phone automatically connects to the hands-free system and the call can continue.

However, last winter I rammed a pile of snow in a parking lot with the front end of my car, which caused the park distance control to go haywire. You, dear reader, should be aware that it was by no means a violent impact or the like. Just a nudge. Nevertheless, this led to the situation that since then, whenever I start the vehicle, a penetrating whistling sound is emitted, roughly indicating “another centimetre and it‘ll crash”. Fortunately, the whistling stops after what seems like 15 seconds, probably it is only 7 or 8. Now you may ask why I haven’t bothered to have this damage repaired yet. The answer is quite simple and probably familiar to many readers: It hasn’t been annoying enough to date for me to put my money where my mouth is and have it fixed.

But back to my phone call. We chatted while I walked to my car, sat down, put the phone in the designated tray and started the engine. As expected, the hands-free system now connected to the phone and the whistle went off. I asked my friend if I could be understood again, to which my friend replied that I could, but there was an unpleasant penetrating whistling in the background. I explained the background – the whole thing with the pile of snow, the whistling and so on, and added that while all this was quite annoying, the irritating noise would reliably stop sometime by itself. To which my friend replied that it had a head start on a few smart-arses he could think of.

Original text: RGE
English translation: BCO