Alarmed

At 4am this morning our house alarm went off. It had to happen because Mark is out of town. That's the way things work around here. Mark goes out of town and things break or malfunction. Being the princess that I am, I call the repair men. Which irritates Mark, because I should wait until he comes home to fix that which is broken. UhhHUH!

I patiently waited 3 minutes for the monitoring company to call, tell me it was the fire alarm and not the glass or door break alarm. The monitoring lady stayed on the phone with me while I went to my son's room to find him standing at the bedroom door, with his shotgun loaded ready to shoot an intruder, and escort me around the house to make sure everything was OK. Which it was. No fire, no intruder.

This same situation happened about 2-3 years ago, when Mark was out of town, only at 2am. The security system company rep. is Jeff. I paged him every 20 minutes until he called me back at 8am and told me which wires to unscrew to disconnect the siren. He claimed he accidentally turned off his pager and did not realize it until 8am. UhhHuh! The worst part of that episode was, I had to sit at the alarm pad and every 30 seconds enter the code to shut it off. I did that for 6 hours. My neighbors were so annoyed they called the police 3 times, but there was nothing I could do because I did not know how to shut it off. The very good looking police officers tried too, but knew less then I did. As it turned out there was a spider web inside one of the sensors and that was causing the malfunction. Jim the installer repair guy showed me which wires inside the main alarm box to dismantle if the system ever malfunctioned again, and advised me to vacuum the sensors a couple times a year. OK so I did not mark the wires to detach, but I do vacuum the sensors.

This morning at 4am I vacuumed all the sensors and it finally shut off the siren, the monitoring company disconnected their end of the system so they would not keep getting notified of an alarm. The monitoring lady told me to call the security system company to advise them of the malfunction. I was going to wait until 9am to make the call because I thought everything was OK. That was until 6am when the alarm went off again. I paged Jeff, no reply, 20 minutes later paged him again, no reply. I paged him 5 times with no reply.

After looking carefully at the main system box I saw 3 white wires, and after putting on my glasses I saw a couple of symbols that looked like bells. So I took a chance and under screwed them. AAAHHHHH. Quite! The siren stopped.

HHHmmmm. Lets put this together, a Red Head, awake since 4am, dealing with annoying noise that the neighbors are not happy about, no reply to pages, dogs barking and crying, husband out of town, and prior problem with system company, all this equals === a nasty attitude brewing.

Jeff finally called me at 9:30 this morning, his excuse, he did not get the pages until then. Funny I left messages on the answering machine too, he did not check it. I made it clear that I was not happy, he used the same excuse 2 years ago when I needed his help. His answer to me, after being a 12 year customer, who pays on time and only had 2 problems in that 12 years and recommend his company which resulted in a few new customers for him, find another company, have a nice life. Click. The ass hung up on me.

Before he hung up he told me that he is not on call 24 hours, funny that's not what the contract states. And that he told me 2 years ago how to disconnect if there was a problem. OK he did. But at 4am I am not a clear thinker, and looking at a bunch of tangled tiny wires trying to remember if it is the white, the cream or the lite yellow, which f ing blend together on my color wheel, are the ones that are suppose to be disconnected is going to be a problem. Why the Fuck didn't Jim the repair guy tag them so I would know!!!! I didn't say those things to Jeff, but I did tell him he sucked at being a business person and I was going to let the Better Business Association know that he failed to respond again. I think he hung up when I said that.

So now I have to find another company. Jeff better refund my monitoring fees, the ass.