Alarums and Excursions

A couple of months ago one of the apartments upstairs was burgled. It's owned by a gay couple, and as well as having assorted stuff stolen, they also had their porno tapes and sex toys and whatever else thrown all over the flat. Since then, they've had several instances of local kids buzzing their entryphone and hurling homophobic abuse. Nice.

Anyway, in response to this, Ian arranged to beef up the security in our flat, strengthening doors, adding various new locks, installing an alarm. Most of this manages to be less inconvenient than I expected, but still.

I've never been a fan of burglar alarms. They're a pain in the arse, and I'm not convinced they're much of a deterrent -- there's always one going off somewhere, and nobody ever seems to bat an eyelid. But this one is at least pretty streamlined in its operation, and it has a phone link to an alarm receiving and keyholding service, which means that there should actually be someone paying attention when it goes off, rather than the usual collection of passersby going "What is that racket? Will someone please just shut that bloody thing off?"

Anyway, it's been in for a while, and I've gotten fairly used to it. Alas, it turns out to have at least one significant design flaw.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a piece of security equipment, it's a paranoid little fucker. All the important stuff is inside a heavy steel box with anti-tampering alarms all over, which is fair enough. If you try to interfere with it, it makes a lot of noise. It also frequently checks the phone line to ensure it remains in contact with the receiving centre. If something goes wrong with that, it makes a lot of noise.

I think you can see where I'm going with this.

Around 12.30 this morning, the phone line went down. (ADSL connection too, obviously, which is why I didn't post to the blog last night.) The alarm box noticed before I did and immediately decided to draw my attention to this fact -- and Ian's attention, and the attention of everyone else within a five mile radius. That thing is loud.

After a bit of headless chickening, we managed to acknowledge the alarm and shut it up. Ian had already gone to bed, and since I could no longer squander precious hours of my life on the net, I decided to head off too. Almost immediately, the alarm went off again.

Again, I silenced it. I dug out the manual and followed the instructions, which were extremely simple and pretty much replicated what I'd done before. I gave it a stern look and went to bed.

Just as I was falling asleep, it went off again. This time, I was cross.

Once again, I shut it up. I scoured the manual for the "Yes I know there's a bloody line fault, there's sod all I can do about it now, it's the middle of the night and I'm trying to sleep so shut the fuck up!" option. But it turns out there isn't one.

As I said, a design flaw.

As you can probably imagine, I was not in the best of tempers when I called the alarm centre. Much faffing ensued. Eventually a sleepy-sounding engineer phoned back, and having established that, no, there was no way to just shut the thing up, and no, that wasn't a great bit of design, and no, I shouldn't just bash the thing to bits with a hammer because if I did that it would really get very noisy indeed, he talked me through disconnecting the phone connection so it would meekly give up, and I finally got some damn sleep.

This morning the line was working, I reconnected the alarm and all is well. Some question remains over whether this whole process is perfectly secure, but never mind.

This alarm is nothing compared to the building fire alarm, however, which was designed to be audible from the moon. Oh, what fun we've had with that...
Posted by matt at December 3, 2003 05:18 PM