Yesterday afternoon a kind neighbour called and invited us over for dinner. Perfect, I didn’t feel like cooking as that would require walking away from my post jotting down the license plates of every car that drives down our street.
We walked over around 5pm and were home by 7:45pm. Kids tucked into bed by 8pm and I was on the couch watching Desperate Housewives by 9pm. I find these timelines might come to benefit me long term if ever I need to describe in detail our whereabouts.
Hence our visits from Alarm Force to beef up security over the weekend. Obviously, I’m not going to give away all of our secrets, that would be foolish. Let me just say, it involves the world’s biggest panic room, enough canned goods to last a lifetime and actor Richard Kline better known as Larry the upstairs neighbour from Three’s Company.
Are we getting carried away? Well, based on last night’s fiasco, perhaps.
After spending an additional undisclosed amount of money on security provisions, we asked Alarm Force for a sign for the front lawn. The technician/undercover agent/Priest replied, “Sure, that’ll be $19.”
I hadn’t planned to mention this Alarm Force but seriously? We have been paying $30/month for SEVEN years. We armed our house with your system, someone presumably less intelligent than one of your free window stickers managed to foil your design and you won’t kick in a free lawn sign that helps us (the home owner) while at the same time, promotes your business?
By 9:30pm I had fallen asleep on the couch so I approached my bathroom in an effort to brush my teeth, check on the kids and climb into bed. I brushed, I checked the baby’s room and the house alarm started blaring.
In that moment of semi-consciousness, I became one of the housewives, Bree, caught for who knows what she’s gotten herself into this time. It sent a jolt through my body. Lynette? Susan?
The representative who added the new technology had installed the settings incorrectly so instead of allowing me to give my child a hug goodnight while at the same time stopping anyone who doesn’t pass the series of retinal scans who will then be trapped in a small, metal cage and several great white sharks will swim up from the duct work and gnaw at the bars until I decide what I want to do with them. I started chanting, “My name is Werner Brandis. My voice is my passport, verify me.”
We got yelled at by the alarm company thugs over the loud speaker for a while until they sorted things out. Every time I walked into the bedroom to crawl into my bed a robot voice through a megaphone would repeatedly shout, “TWELVE! TWELVE! TWELVE! TWELVE!” Not in the nice Sesame Street disco ball counting kind of way, think robot wars and one of them is having her period. For the record bad guys, if you even think of breaking into our house again, someone will be yelling “Twelve!” at you the entire time.
Then I would leave room twelve and curl up on the living room couch which for the record is, “Twenty-two! Twenty-two! Twenty-two!”
The kids slept through everything.
Then around 1am I was pretty sure I could hear people in the hot-tub which is the only thing in and around our house not rigged to explode.
Yet.
