Technobabble

Security Systems

Posted by on Jan 19, 2007 | One Comment

Does a security system make you feel more secure? My mom called a few weeks back, out of the blue. “You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “I just had a new security system installed.” Now I don’t have quite as many neurosis as the lead character in any given Woody Allen movie, but I’m not going to stop worrying about my mom just because she was enticed into buying a security system.

I got another phone call a week or so after the security system was installed.

“Hello, Mr. Gray,” said the unfamiliar voice on the other end of the phone. Sensing that it might be a telemarketer, my hand hovered over the switch hook.

“Yes,” I replied tentatively.

“This is [name removed due to amnesia] from [big name] Security. We have a report that your mother’s security system has gone off.”

“Gone off what?” I replied, smart alec that I am.

“Your mother’s security system has been triggered,” she replied, unfazed. “Can you meet the police at her house.”

“No, I’m afraid I cannot,” I explained. With my car in the shop, I was stuck at the ranch.

So I waited hours until I finally heard from my mom. She was fine.

Did I worry in the meantime? Heck yeah.

It turned out that she triggered her new security system before heading out for the day. She couldn’t figure out how to shut the system off, so she just hopped in the car and split.
Niiiiiiiiiiice.

Now that would have made for a humourous surveillance camera video …

Age has it’s privileges, I suppose. When you hit eighty, they give you the gold card.

[tags]security systems, surveillance systems[/tags]

  • Chuck

    Let me guess: she turned the system on before leaving, then either took too long to exit the house, or went back inside for something.

    You would not beleive how common this is. I worked for 6 months in one of the largest alarm system monitoring centers in the country, and this happened many times a day among the several hundred thousand clients we had.

    Most of the alarm dealers do a very poor job of training their clients in the use of the alarm system. Basically, they show them how to enter their code to enter the house, how to turn the system on when they leave, and that’s it. They don’t tell them what will happen when the alarm goes off, they don’t instruct them to tell the people on their call list (like you) that they will be getting these calls at odd hours, and they don’t tell them how to handle the situations like your mother had.

    I give you credit – most people in your situation decide it is the fault of the person who called you from the alarm monitoring center. This is common, especially in situation where we had to call people, day after day, to tell them that we hadn’t received their alarm’s daily test signal. After a few weeks of daily calls, they would get angry, even as we tried to patiently explain that this meant that if their alarm went off, we probably wouldn’t get that signal either. This happened on more than one occasion, and they tried to blame the monitoring center for not sending the police or fire department. Just imagine!

    Oh, well, enough of my rant. Get the manual for your mother’s alarm system and show her yourself how to handle the different situations for it.

    -cjb-