Home Security

I don’t know if the UK is inherently safer than the US or if people in the UK just do not have the same level of fear pumped in to them as they do here, but everything is a crisis in America and people often focus on the worst possible outcome.

There are a lot of disaster whores in the US media and local news is the best/worst for this. I’ve written before about the ridiculous Tropical Storm warnings. I’ve gone out on the advice of Brian Shiels the weatherman more times than I care to admit and bought 400 bottles of water, enough canned food to feed an army and several pocket knives to get me through the pending Armageddon that he has predicted. Every single time without fail it just turned out to be a fairly average wet day on Canvey Island.

This fear is even more evident when it comes to home invasion. Since I moved to the USA in January 2015 I have lived in 6 houses/apartments, all 6 have had incredibly complex burglar alarm systems, despite the fact it is 100% legal to murder in cold blood anybody who enters your house uninvited. Lately I’ve been praying my neighbor accidentally stumbles through my door one night, or at least his noisy dog.

I never had a burglar alarm in the UK, I always thought it made more sense to just buy the sign that says “Protected by ADT” rather than the actual alarm system. I mean what would the sign cost, $10? The alarm system costs about $100 a month.

We don’t have the alarm system set up right now. So I thought we just had a keypad in the wall that if I wanted to organize and set up was capable of being used. Turns out I was wrong and I found out in the worse possible way.

There was a bad lightning storm the other night and there was a loud strike right by our house. All the power went out and a couple of minutes later everything reset. This was at 2am. Gradually as everything came back on I started to hear an annoying beep.

I woke Laura up to see if she could hear it, but the combination of her almost complete and utter total hearing loss and the fact she sleeps like I’m slipping her rohypnal on an hourly basis meant she was not bothered by it. I on the other hand was wide awake and the regular beep every 20 seconds was pissing me off.

I got up to try and stop this noise and first stop was the alarm panel in our utility room. That was the culprit so I thought I was halfway there to solving my problem. I turned off the power to the unit and went back to bed.

The good people at ADT though, they want to keep you safe when there is a powercut and so the battery back up kicked in and the noise just carried on and on. It was like Chinese water torture, not that Laura noticed, she had slipped back in to her coma.

Now I will admit after 20 minutes I was angry, tired and angry. I got back up and just hit some buttons on the panel. The combination of me swearing and cursing and the beeping actually woke Laura up so I now had an audience as my meltdown began.

Just as I finished mashing the keypad Laura gave some fairly decent advice, that I shouldn’t do that in case I accidentally armed the alarm. Unfortunately she gave me that advice exactly 4 seconds after I had inadvertently set the alarm I didn’t even know worked. That was a great thing to have happen as the second we moved the beep turned in to an ear piercing alarm that would have woken the street.

The combination of tiredness, frustration and now utter fear that the police were going to turn up meant I had a bit of breakdown. I started to panic and could not think of a way to stop this absolute nightmare. Laura ran out and turned all the power off to the house and there was silence, beautiful silence.

I phoned up the alarm company who had literally no idea who I was. 25 minutes of my English accent trying to explain that I didn’t have a contract with them and could not prove I lived at my house, but needed them to help me stop the ear drum piercing noise followed. I’ve had less frustrating calls at 3am.

The woman gave me a number of codes to put in to the keypad to reset it. Not a single one of these codes caused anything other than the alarm to just go off, yet we persisted with this utter bollocks just long enough for me to thank the woman for nothing and hang up.

She did say though that worst case scenario just to flick the fuse/breaker off that supplied power to the alarm and it would stop and maybe they could get someone round in 3 days. A brilliant solution, except that meant no power to our bedroom, ensuite or closet.

At this point the red mist had come down and I had lost my shit.

In our closet there is a panel, I believed at that moment that the whole alarm systems electronics was behind this panel. i couldn’t be sure though because we had no power to the room and it was 3am. Total darkness. 15 minutes later I had found a screwdriver and taken this panel off just by the light of Laura’s phone and my sheer will power.

This didn’t work either. Behind that panel was the entire communication network for the house, cables everywhere, nothing to do with the alarm whatsoever. Complete waste of time and effort.

I’d been up about 2 hours by this point, the power was off to the AC unit so it was hot, I couldn’t even turn the fan on because again, no power. Just I was about to give up and resign myself to no power in the bedroom for 3 days I saw a box and on that box was a sticker that read “ADT”

This box was basically on the ceiling, 10 feet off the ground. I went and got the steps. It’s pitch dark, so hot my chest hair has matted together like a gap year student in Goa’s dreadlocks but I must be nearly there.

I undo the screws, swearing and cursing with every turn of the completely unfit for purpose screwdriver. Once the box is open I can see a battery. I was looking at some wiring 10 feet off the ground, the only light coming from the 5 foot 3 inch tall Laura shining her iPhone 7 flashlight approximately 9 inches away from where it needs to be. There are some wires going to the battery, I am tired and frustrated, I just ripped all the wires out of the battery. I’ve no idea if this is the right thing to do, but at that point that was all I had left.

We put the power back on and the beeping seemed to have stopped. If I can cool down and get to sleep quickly I might still get two hours sleep before I have to get up. I went and changed, because frankly my sweat wicking boxer shorts had failed dismally. As I went back in to the closet to get changed I heard another beep, and then another, and another.

I don’t mind admitting that at this point I lost my shit completely. Laura made some comment about minding my blood pressure which only pissed me off even more, especially as she had spent the last 2 hours telling me that I shouldn’t have armed the alarm and when she wasn’t doing that she was shining the light juuusst in the wrong spot, so I got the slightest bit of light, but not enough to be worthwhile.

I got back up on the ladder and there was one more wire that was still connected. This wire ran to a plug, simple. Just pull the plug out and go to bed, ignore Laura laughing at the mess I was in and all will be good.

I tried to pull the plug out and it wouldn’t move. Some absolute cockwomble had screwed the plug into the wall. In order to remove it I had to unscrew it from the wall and the screws were about the size of the screws in Fred’s glasses.

For the next 30 minutes I was using a steak knife to try and unscrew two cross head screws in a plug in almost complete and utter darkness.

My life was in infinite more danger from the stress induced heart attack caused by trying to fix the alarm than from any intruder into our house that is in a gated community. I was going to call the alarm company and get it all set up, but when I went to look at the mess I had caused the next day it is beyond repair.

So with no alarm system and Nancy Alvarez from Channel 9 news whipping up hysteria on the news every morning I decided to take some strong action. The morning after this with Nancy’s dulcet tones telling me about a gas station being robbed 50 miles from my house I sat down and spent 4 hours doing my hunting license so I can buy a pump action shotgun. That and the sign outside my house saying I have an alarm should be more than enough, and if it isn’t I’ll send Laura out to tell the intruder all the things he is doing wrong.