I’m Calling Security!

I always buy my wife beautiful hanging baskets for Mother’s Day. We hang them on the front porch, where they frame our view of the neighborhood while we are standing at the kitchen sink. Then, one day a few years back, all of a sudden, our baskets were gone. We tracked a trail of petals and leaves out to the street, where the trail ended. Obviously, the perp had someone waiting for them in a getaway car. After that, I started securing the baskets to the trim work we hung them from.

After this, I really wanted some additional security. I had never worried too much about home security, beyond taking some obvious precautions, such as limiting how wide windows can be opened, deadbolts on doors leading in from the garage and back porch, and security-type screen doors. Having a police officer park his squad car next door also doesn’t hurt. Sadly, none of these had saved our hanging baskets.

I started researching my security options, and spent days and days poring over all the types of devices, reading all the reviews. So many of them – very well-known brands – had as many bad reviews as good ones. I finally settled on a battery-powered camera, the brand of which appears to have been lost to antiquity. Overall, it works great.

But then one day, my wife showed me a really cool device – a security camera that 1) just screws into a light socket; 2) has motion tracking capabilities, plus better resolution than our current camera, and 3) we could turn and aim the camera from the app on our phone. That would be awesome, I thought – it would be able to track people or vehicles from the street to our front door! So, we ordered it online, from the manufacturer, and almost immediately found that – as careful as I had thought I’d been, navigating a dozen extra screens trying to sell us all kinds of add-ons – that they had signed us up for a “service” offering amazing “discounts” on electronics, all for only $14.95 a month. We finally got that resolved, and started working on getting the camera set up.

Which turned into one challenge after another. First off, screwing the camera into the light socket on the covered front porch made it so high that the trim basically hid everything except the front door from view. Oh, so THAT’S why they sold “extenders.” We found some on Amazon for less than half of what we’d seen on the website. All fixed? No, not quite. There had been some minor issues with the wind blowing the camera around from the start; now it was virtually unusable. I found some sturdy foam, and cobbled up a collar for the device that stabilized it pretty well.

But the viewing area was still off, and less than optimal. So, I removed it from the far light socket, and moved it to the one nearest the door. Now at least it could see the driveway, one of our chief objectives. But then we noticed it wouldn’t even pick up delivery drivers standing on the porch. Why? For some reason, it would rotate all the way to the left, away from the front door, focusing on our neighbor’s yard. We’d use the app to rotate it back, but it just seemed to like resting where it didn’t ever have to work. So, I re-aimed it, and turned off the auto-tracking feature.

Did I mention that it would automatically sound an alarm whenever someone walked on the front porch? Really loud and super annoying. I could also change it to multiple versions of “This Is Private Property,” but mehh, not really what we wanted. BUT, we could record our own version, so of course I had to record a line from the Alan Parson’s Project song “Eye In The Sky,” so people would hear “I am the eye in the sky, looking at you-oo-oo” when they were on our porch. So fun, until the wind started blowing, and that would play every time the rose bush moved in the wind. After a sleepless night with that tune playing over and over again in my head, I changed it. It now sounds like a tin dog barking. Frankly, I’m getting sick and tired of hearing that dog bark continuously when the wind blows (like it is now).

Well, it was an interesting experiment. Sadly, I’m thinking I’m going to have to re-home this little device. Any takers? I won’t even automatically charge your credit card to subscribe you to a useless scam service!