Wadda Ya Do

Refer them to Brinks...they will take care of them alright.

Jim Rojas Technical Manuals Online!

Kills me. The "cop" calling from his cell phone was pissed at me for refusing to come help. Didn't seem to understand that there were painfully obvious reasons why I wouldn't just tell him how to disable an alarm system over the phone.

Next time tell the officer that it is the same when the police don't respond to alarms without a permit on file.

Jim Rojas Technical Manuals Online!

You handled it allright. I would have done the same thing. Although I might have given one or all of them the name and number of a couple of installers that have jerked me around in the past by not unlocking a panel when the customer wasn't getting good service and wanted me to take over their system.

It's funny sometimes. I keep track of the guys who've given me a hard time but they don't don't keep track of who they 've screwed. Every once in a while I'll get a bad customer and I'll refer them to one of these installers and sometimes I'll get a message thanking me for the referral. ( heh heh heh >:-> ) Obviously they're calling me before they actually visit or speak to the client.

RHC: Why is it that people think just because a cop says something related to security that it is so. Some of the very worst, incorrect and downright foolish advice that has been given out to customers has come from police officers !! Being good at "policing" doesn't mean they know squat about security.....

Unfortunately, you'd be hard put to find a Cop who would admit that. We've always got a number of alarm companys that are popping up in the area, that are owned by retired Cops and they almost always fail. They always try to cash in on the fact that they are ( or were) police officers. Those very few who prevail have got to make a quantum shift in their thinking to meld into the hardware security trade.

In other words, they've got to truly believe that they will never get the chance to shoot the intruder. :-)

RHC: Absolutely right ! There is a local company here that was started by a retired cop. I know him well and he is doing ok...not great...but ok ! But he's the first to admit that he milks his past history at every opportunity, and his record of police experience goes a long way towards making potential customers trust him. Hey, if you can't trust a cop, who can you trust ??...:)) Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily mean he knows jack shit about security or is any better at it than others in the business.

Another fallacy in the security trade....

Over the years we have had a few detective/guard agencys try it as well as police officers who all found it hard to maintain a business.

The one common trait I've often seen in successful installers is innovativeness. From the time that I was a kid, I was always modifiing my bikes, or trains or cars to make them do what they weren't supposed to do. Thinking of things and attempting to create them and then having those things eventually show up as somebody else's idea. For instance, being a boater, about 30 years ago, I thought that if an electronic fish finder can find fish a hundred feet below while it's pointed downward, since sound waves travel differently in water as compared to air, why couldn't there be a similar device mounted at the bottom of a swimming pool that could tell when a kid fell in the pool? After all these years, I see that someone is just now marketing such a device.

I once had a sub-contractor installer working with me on a residential job. I was drilling a window, ran into an obsticle in the wall and the bit popped out of the newley painted wall. Nice elongated hole in the grey paint. I could tell that the sub-contractor sort of "snickered" at the fact that I'd made such a novice like mistake and made comment about having to explain to the owner what had happened. We went on to finish the rest of the house while I thought about the hole in the wall. When the job was finished the Sub asked me what I was going to say about the hole I'd made and I said that I wasn't going to tell him and told him to see if he could find the hole.

That night, after he had left the job, I went downstairs to the basement and scraped some soot from the flue of the oil burner and mixed it with some spackle to just the right color grey and through the day had added coats and smoothed it out with wet towels. You could barely tell there was a mark on the wall and since it was behind a lamp table, it wasn't going to be seen unless you were looking for it. I remember feeling pretty smug about being able to pull it out of the fire when the other guy had been willing to give up.

Anyway, I'm sure we all have stories about things like that. But it's that kind of thinking that has always been what I think is needed in any kind of trades job.

You learn from your mistakes and hopefully do not do them again the problem is the higher the voltage you work with like me the more dangerous the mistake.

I would have told him to unplug the battery and snip off one of the A/C leads.

Hell, they are already 'in' the house... It's not like you're telling them how to circumvent a live system.

At least that way you get no more calls, and the cop doesn't go around bad-mouthing your company.

So how do I KNOW it's a cop, and if its not a monitored system the siren going off may be the only protection they have regardless of the circumstances of how it came to be unmonitored. I really don't think I can take that chance. If somebody bad mouths me it may hurt my business, but if I tell a neighborhood hoodlum how to totally disable an alarm so he can loot somebody's house I'll probably be out of business.

Had a similar situation where customer was on vacation and away and some one broke in and system was going batty and I told officer that I needed to verify he was who he was I asked for his name and badge I then told him i would call back after I called 911 and verified he was on premise which he was. He totally understood and was very professional about it. as any officer should be. he turned off system and I got there and secured my customers business. till a responsible employee arrived. and they called glass guys etc. I definitely agree with you not unless I know who is on a premise would I give that kind of information. Too many lawsuit ass holes out there.