Man, I have this huge backlog of stuff I’ve wanted to blog about. Nearly every day for the past two weeks, I’ve told myself that I’ll come home after work and at least bang out something. And each night, I get tied up in housework, schoolwork, and uh, playing video games.
Here’s a quick story of some weird stuff that went down late last night. At about 2:30 a.m., we were woken up by a nearby police siren going off sporadically. There would be a “Bwooop! Bwoooooooop!”, silence for about a minute, then another pair of bwoops.
Finally, Tala gets up to check. She’s back in a flash, saying, “The police are out front.” So I roll out of bed and, sure enough, there are several cop cars parked out front, including one blocking our driveway and one in the neighbor’s driveway with his lights flashing.
The weird thing is, we don’t see any movement. There are no cops milling about or talking to either of our neighbors. Nobody has knocked on our door, either. After 5-10 minutes, the cop in front of our driveway drives off and parks at the end of the street. Another 5-10 minutes later, the cop next door switches off his lights and drives away.
This morning, I told a friend with several cop buddies and he said it sounded like they had set up a perimeter to try to snare somebody on foot. They typically park or cruise a street with lights flashing and making some noise in hopes of turning the guy back and into cops pressing from the other side.
Later in the morning, I called the sheriff’s office and they confirmed there had been a burglary in the vicinity and there had been a search for the perp.
Eventually, Tala talked to our neighbors and it turns out that someone found an unlatched ground floor window, crawled through, turned on the kitchen light, then exited out the back door. These neighbors have an alarm system but the volume was set so low they didn’t realize right away what was happening.
Now, here’s the twist that makes you go, “Hmmmmm.” Earlier in the evening, our row of houses was visited by a guy selling home security systems. This same guy had been by a couple months ago when all of us first moved in, and he was checking back to push us yet again. Our neighbors said they mentioned that to the police and wondered outright if the salesman had set the whole thing up. The cops actually agreed that that was a distinct possibility. The recommended everyone get an alarm, but not from that guy.
The problem is that according to my friend’s cop buddies, the home-monitoring style of security systems are worthless because it takes police 30 minutes to two hours to respond. What is useful is the audible alarm part of those setups because they scare the burglar away. By the time the cops get around to checking things out, he’s long gone.
Unfortunately, most modern alarms are actually service plans and more resemble cellphones or cable TV than household appliances. Why sell someone a set of low-margin hardware once when you can sell them discounted hardware and lock them into a $50/month subscription? The difference is that with cellphones and cable TV, the service portion is actually the most useful: without a network connection or programs piped through, a cellphone or cable box is useless. But with alarms, it’s the initial 60 seconds of 90-decible wailing that provides 99 percent of the value.
As if that’s not enough of a scam, we have to suspect that unscrupulous salesmen are arranging break-ins to spur demand.
