Emergency vehicle sirens.

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Are you terrified of them? I just hate whenever I'm walking down the street and a vehicle with the siren on drives by.

They are effective at giving people notice of an emergency vehicle, which is we need for vehicles which have a legal and moral right to (safely) operate a motor vehicle outside of the normal traffic rules.

Oh, welcome to WP. If you go to the new member threads, Tim Tex will get you your gift basket.

I understand their importance, but yes, I am also terrified of them. I jump and then put my hands over my ears and and generally stunned while they go past. Rather slows my progress to places because there are a lot of Emergency vehicles in my area.

I try to deal with them but when they pass me and are close to me (maybe 10-20m distance) I have the urge to quickly hold my ears, this is the critical zone.
In case I'm walking down the street with my family I resist this urge but when I'm alone I don't. I am not terrified by it, I just don't think it is comfortable, they're a tad bit too loud.

This has reasons: I'm tired of comments like "Don't act so weird, this is just a siren" as an example.
The other reason is: My grandparents have no idea that I could be aspie and they have certain prejudices about autism which I guess you know too well (just as my mother had it in her childhood and teenage years).

Last edited by Sylvastor on 06 Jan 2013, 3:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

i dont get terrified perse, but the sound they make is quite painful, so they do stress me out.

They don't scare me but the noise hurts my ears.

And it's almost like it hurts my eyes.

Once I was walking on a relatively deserted road an ambulance drove past. Just as it passed me, the siren was turned on for a second for no reason at all. I think I jumped quite high.

But yes, they are quite annoying. Luckily I don't hear them so often now after I've moved. Back then I could not go outside without hearing them.

Something closer to this for me. I'm never really *scared* by loud noises as such (unless they are very sudden) but they do hurt and sap away at my limited coping resources meaning that after a certain length of exposure I almost certainly will meltdown or shutdown.

When I was a lad they went, ding a ling a ling, back in the good old days, then they had two tone horns which where just two standard car horns at different tone, I hate the ones they have now, I hate to think how bad the next generation of sirens will sound.

Every day the world seems to get slightly worst.

Like others have said, I don't find them terrifying but they're pretty painful if you're up close. It's people that randomly honk their cars horn that usually make me jump.

I hate them. When they get close enough it makes me feel like my world is spinning, and not in a good way.

Sudden and/or high-pitched noises, like sirens, will startle me if not dampened by distance or fingers in ears. I have an auditory hyposensitivity, so it's probably mild misophonia, or a "normal" reaction.

They always give me such a fright and I find myself covering my ears and shuddering until the noise is gone. It's just so shrill and loud, if I was walking across a street and an emergency vehicle comes screaming around the corner, I often wonder if I would be able to get myself out of the way or just stand there like an idiot covering my ears.

They have never bothered me except once. Over the summer my oldest daughter and I were walking back to our house from my mother's. We crossed the main road and were walking down it toward our street and we could hear cars coming up the road behind us but we were on the grass and out of the road and didn't turn around to look. We were minding our own business and talking and this ambulance drove up behind us with their sirens off. Right as they got behind us they let go a "WOOP WOOP" tone! Both of us jumped ten feet off the ground it felt like! We yelled, waved, all that but they just kept going. We know who it was and he's always pulling jokes on people but he's a good paramedic.