Apathy Sketchpad

I was in Allders recently, and I noticed a product which seemed too random to exist in any reasonable universe. While it has long been common practice for companies to combine existing technologies into one product, quite who decided that a calculator and a baby monitor would combine to make good espionage equipment remains a mystery.

But what I really wanted to talk about is the Personal Attack Alarm most of the girls at Leeds University carry around (the obvious joke to make here being that the alarm will be right at the bottom of their handbag, since they almost never use it, so they’ll take about half an hour to alert anybody). The idea of the Alarm is for women to sound it by pushing something called a Sonic Head when they are being attacked, and the high-pitched, shrill whining noise it makes will disorientate the attacker whilst alerting other people to the incident. All very laudable. The baffling thing about this device, though, is that, for reasons known only to themselves, they have opted to make it look exactly like a dry erase marker pen. It appears that they were trying to disguise it, so attackers wouldn’t know the women had alarms, but it further appears they missed a couple of fairly important points. The first thing they missed is that no women I have ever met carry dry erase pens in their handbags. The second, and probably the most important, is that there is no rhyme or reason why anyone would want to disguise an alarm system. If it was me, I’d want people to know I had an alarm. It might make them think twice about attacking me in the first place. I thought that was what this thing was for. I’d want a t-shirt to come with it saying “Andrew is protected by LUU Personal Attack Alarm Systems”. A dry-erase pen won’t put off any potential attackers, will it? It should look like what it is, or failing that, it should look like a Tommy gun. That would put me off, if I was an attacker.