I answered my front door to two police officers at about 1:30 this morning, the final result of a comedy of errors and a security system that malfunctions on a regular basis.... and a bit of procrastination on my part.
We have had this security system for five years or more. Seemed like a reasonable idea when we had it installed. But almost from the beginning, a few of the windows have consistently given off false alerts. Mostly these consist of the non-emergency, merely annoying, sort of beep.beep.beep. alerts, but increasingly they have involved the full blown banshee scream emergency alarm variety. Usually between the hours of 1 and 3 am. Last time we got to this point with one of the windows regularly setting off the alarm for no apparent reason, we went through 3 different repair guys each repairing something different and swearing that those other guys were idiots who didn't know what they were doing, before the problem seemed to be solved. Scheduling a repair from this company means agreeing to either be home all morning or all afternoon anxiously awaiting their arrival. They can't even narrow it down to a two hour window, they need at least 4. So I thought I was being pretty clever to just 'bypass' the trouble windows every night when I set the alarm and avoid the whole repair thing. Never mind that I was essentially saying "hey, if you want to break into my house---use one of these two windows and you'll be good." But my plan back fired when one night the alarm went off even though we hadn't even set it yet!
So last night at 1 am we were awakened (again) by the alarm screaming in the kitchen. Great. We keep a remote upstairs to turn it off, but I can't even see the stupid thing without glasses and it was 1 am! Kris managed to come to full consciousness a little ahead of me and get to that remote... but he made the mistake of thinking that the red button must be off...right? Of course. No...that would be panic. A mistake I have learned myself through bitter experience. He did find the right button on the second try, but the damage was done. Except, typically if you turn off the alarm in however many seconds you are allowed, then you get an automated call that says "we noticed your alarm went off but you seem to have beat the clock and shut it off so we aren't calling 911 for you, hopefully that is what you want." In the case of hitting the panic button (yeah I have done it before) you get a live person on the phone instead, they verify that you are the person who should be answering the phone and ask if you meant to hit that panic button in which case they should send help, or did you, like everyone else, just identify the red color of the button with meaning off, in which case you would rather go back to bed and be left alone?
Except last night we didn't get either call. At least not on the phone we expected it. They called Kris's cell phone...which is on vibrate (always) making it hard to hear over a screaming alarm you are desperately trying to shut down, and also probably number 3 on their list of contact numbers. After examining 3 cellphones to see which had been vibrating, and listening to a partial message from the security people, Kris just called the security company. They put him on hold. He told them he was calling because an alarm had gone off-- and they put him on hold. I am feeling more secure all the time. When he did get to talk to a person, he was informed that police were on their way because we hadn't answered our phone when they called (the wrong number). About the time they were offering to try to recall the police, I could hear the doorbell ringing. So I stumbled down the stairs to assure the nice policemen who were shining flashlights through my front windows that we were fine. Kris followed, with the phone.... he was on hold again.
I even remembered to turn off the alarm before opening the door.
This afternoon (between the hours of 1 and 5) a repairman came. Because, unlike me, my husband is not a procrastinator of any sort and he just went ahead and called them at 2 am to set up an appointment, I mean, why not? He was up. The repairman assured me that I am wrong, my alarm DOES NOT go off when I haven't even set it, and then replaced a bunch of sensors. Hopefully he will not be first in a series of repairmen. Though, given last night, I am beginning to wonder if I really need anything more than that trusty baseball bat I have always relied on as a security system...at least it has never woken me up at 1 am. Never.
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