The last time I read about this I kept wondering how many times the person accidentally broke a window pane with the big long stick. Some of the houses were already 80+ years old at that point, and I've lived in houses with original window glass from pre-1900 - just single pane, wavy, very thin glass. You could breathe on them wrong and break a pane. I'd never have trusted myself to with a 3 meter long stick to poke up at a 2nd story window pane loud enough to wake someone up but not so hard as to break a thin windowpane...