Jungle noise

I had a diverse career in medicine, as I have described before. I retired from full-time practice when I turned 50 at the end of 1999. (The artist known as Prince had nothing to do with choosing that date.) I spent several years trying to decide what to do going forward and none of those ideas panned out as I had hoped, but none of those ideas cost me much money.

Between 2008 and 2012 I worked as a traveling radiologist, working at hospitals that had fired their radiology group and then had to use guys like me to fill the void. I was very well paid and enjoyed all of it. I only worked one week out of two or three and had control of my schedule. I worked for most of those years in Joplin, MO, and would fly into Tulsa on Sunday night and then fly back the next Saturday morning. The airport in Tulsa had a large carport that contained the car rental companies. When I would pick up a car, there were strange noises broadcast through the garage. I told the attendant at the pickup point that it sounded like monkeys hollering. He said, yes indeed—it was the sound of monkeys and other jungle noises to try to keep the pigeons from crapping on all of the cars. I asked him if it worked. He just shrugged and asked, "What do you think?"

At the shopping center where I buy pool supplies, I have noticed that there is a squawking sound outside that I thought was from real parrots. (Having relocated to Florida, we do have a lot of parrots now.) But it is just noise to try to scare away pigeons. I don't think that it works any better in South Florida than it did in Tulsa, Oklahoma.