or: Alarms Are Loud And Can Be Confusing

Alarms are loud and I can confirm this first-hand. Twice.

I’m not familiar with security systems at all.

South Africa is the first place I’ve stayed where most places have them.

I’ve learnt that beams can be sent across the garden, crossing over each other to form an invisible and impenetrable web of sound so if someone or something steps though or on one, the alarm goes off. I am reminded of Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment (this scene), contorting her body through the red string (they act as markets for where the beams would be) and figure this must be a fairly solid method for protecting property.

It turns out the property is safe from all possible intruders including that pesky evening breeze, falling leaves and animals but probably not Catherine Zeta-Jones. She’s just too flexible.

The first alarm I set off was attached to a gate at a house. It had nothing to do with beams. Or Catherine Zeta-Jones.

I was inside the house and asked to open the gate. This is done with a remote control. A remote control which has a few too many buttons. I was told to press the green one. There were two green ones.

I pushed the wrong green one.

I figured the red one would turn it off. It doesn’t. The other green one does.

Lessons learnt
1. Label buttons – e.g. “On”, “Oops”
2. Have various coloured buttons – it’s aesthetically pleasing. Matching them to their function would be ideal.

My introduction to alarm systems was complete.

Next one was a little different. It had everything to do with beams and zones.

Each part of a house can be allocated a zone and an alarm can be set for the overall house or each zone individually so that not all the house is alarmed. This is especially useful to be able to leave a bedroom and go to the toilet in the middle of the night. Also good to be able to keep pets in a section of the house without having them set the alarm ringing.

So… A family member was driving me to another’s house and had been given the code word for the alarm. As it needed to be entered into a keypad, and each number typically has three letters, she transcribed the word into numbers in the hope that it would all be entered before the alarm sounded.

Good in theory.

Execution was a little shaky since when transcribing in the back of the car, we didn’t realise the number one on the keypad didn’t have any letters attached to it. Nor did we check this when we entered the house… the alarm started.

With the alarm screeching like one thousand cats with their tails simultaneously caught in the door and no-one around to free them, the security company phoned. We answered the call though it was a struggle to hear them over the incessant noise. No-one was opening the door for those cats until we could figure out the code. Any burglar would be deaf pretty quickly. Maybe that’s why the stereotypical burglar wears a balaclava, in the hope it will protect their ears. We were asked various security questions by the security company and in the meantime, figured out what we had done wrong.

Entering the correct code, the alarm went off and we went out to the car to collect my things. At this moment, the guy from the alarm company turned up. All very efficient and amicable. Quite impressive.

Lessons learnt
1. Most number one buttons on keypads don’t have corresponding letters, even on telephones
2. When given a code word to change to numbers, make it a rhyme and put it to a tune, perhaps a rap
3. Wear ear protection when turning off someone else’s alarm for the first time, those cats are noisy!

* Thanks to Arctic Monkeys for the title to this post.