As Seen On Ring
We installed security cameras to catch bad guys, little knowing what we’d find.
The security cameras and Ring doorbell are still in their boxes when the Alberta spruce goes flying. It is Christmas time, and the little spruce tree in its fake-concrete planter at the foot of our front steps is festooned with lights and bows. Someone, a Christmas-hater, a drunk, who knows, yanks the spruce up and hurls it down the sidewalk, dumping the planter and giving it a swift kick for good measure.
“Who would do such a thing?”
The unspoken response hangs in the air.
If the cameras had been installed, we’d know.
Up goes the security system and our obsession begins.
Our phones are set to alert us when motion triggers the cameras, not exactly a good idea in the city where dozens, if not hundreds, of people walk past the house every day.
Ding, ding. It’s 12:35 a.m. Three couples who live on our block are passing our house on their way home. What’s this? They’re talking about us!
“The Prices are looking goooood,” says one, pointing at the twinkling greenery on the porch railing.
“Check it out. They have it going on up there,” says another, noting the lights strung across the rooftop deck.
This is great! We’re feeling goooood. Then it hits us. Where they’ve been, we weren’t invited.
Ding, ding. It’s 3:24 a.m. The woman leaves her car running in the middle of the street, scurries across the sidewalk and up our steps to lay the newspaper squarely on the door mat. She darts over to our neighbor’s porch and is back in her car and gone in under 15 seconds. Ours are the only houses on the block that still get a paper. It’s cold and lonely and more than a little scary in the deserted city at 3:24 a.m. I lie awake thinking about the woman out there, doing her job with such efficiency and pluck and wonder if she has children at home that she will wake for school in a few hours.
Ding, ding. It’s 1:10 a.m. A skinny woman with a turquoise scarf tied around her head is in the carport. She’s wearing sandals and shorts in the freezing cold and staggering more than a bit. She pulls at the handle on the car door and finding it locked, tilts and weaves off into the night.
We see this woman six hours later during our morning stroll through the neighborhood. What looked like a scarf on the grainy video is actually a wig woven of shiny plastic turquoise strands. A long plastic turquoise braid trails down her back. The sandals, shorts, and skinny legs are the same, so we know it’s her. She asks for money and Larry says, hey, we saw you this morning trying to break into our car. She says it wasn’t me and can you give me a dollar for coffee? She is coming down from her high and is as jittery as all get out. We tell each other that she’s the sort of woman whose body gets found in a vacant house. Someone should help her, we say, and so we call the police. The dispatcher says there is a car around the corner. The woman is high but not so high that she doesn’t manage to give us the slip.
Ding, ding. We turn off the alerts and begin checking the overnight History of Events, sometimes before we’re even out of bed. 50 new events!
On YouTube, there are cute videos of dogs ringing doorbells with their tongues and bears swimming in backyard pools. City fauna is another story.
A remarkable number of would-be burglars jiggle car door handles but don’t break in. We joke about low-energy criminals in a low-energy town.
Homeless people go through the cans on trash day. We shred our mail.
People stop to smell the dragon-leaf begonias bursting from the planter. We laugh when they jump back and swear at the bees in the blooms.
Parents wrangle kids down the sidewalk. A boy breaks free, bounds up the steps and vaults to the top of the short wall that separates our porch from the neighbors, where he stands arms akimbo and crows like the king of the mountain, “Look at me!”
Motorcyclists zoom past with a deafening roar, making a mockery of the city’s noise ordinance. We replay video looking futilely for license plate numbers and plot ways to derail the bikers. Water balloons? Paint balls? Paper sacks full of steaming dog poo? Of course, we never would. But still . . .
A neighborhood Ring user posts a video of a woman squatting to pee in her basement stairwell, her white moon butt bared large in the fisheye lens. The clip goes viral. We haven’t gotten anything this outrageous on our feed, and despite the eeeeww factor, I’m weirdly envious.
Ding, ding. It’s 5:43 p.m. The UPS man delivers a package we’ve been waiting for all day. I have turned the Ring alert on because this package is very important. In it are screw-on replacement feet for the bed frame that is going to Cleveland to start a new life in our daughter’s first apartment. The bed won’t stand without those feet and our daughter won’t sleep. We hurry home, arriving about 20 minutes after the UPS man.
The package is gone.
But wait. We have Ring!
This is the moment every Ring owner dreams of. We’ll get that SOB!
I punch up the Ring app and swipe open the History of Events. There’s the UPS man. And then . . . nothing. Nothing on the doorbell camera. Nothing on the front porch camera. Not even static or fuzzy video. It’s as though nothing ever happened. Nada.
How can this be?
Ring picks us up going to the front porch and records our dismay, so I know the cameras are working.
My daughter says maybe the porch pirate used a Wi-Fi jammer, and I ask what’s that and how do you know about Wi-Fi jammers?
It’s a thing, she says. She googles and instantly gets dozens of hits. Apparently, everyone but me knows that bad guys carry around inexpensive and highly illegal devices that can disrupt a Wi-Fi signal just long enough to prevent a security camera from transmitting video of their nefarious deeds.
I call Ring customer service and ask, what good is a security system that can be disrupted by a $10 Wi-Fi jammer?
The customer service agent says any system that relies on Wi-Fi is susceptible to signal disruption. You need a hard-wired system, he says, and asks, by the way, do you know where to get a $10 Wi-Fi jammer?
I let loose a few choice words on the recorded line and hang up.
I feel betrayed.
I turn off the alerts and stop scrolling through the History of Events.
Ring is dead to me.
It’s 7:08 a.m. We head out for an early morning stroll and see dirt all over the sidewalk. The little Alberta spruce is askew; the planter has been moved and put back into place.
Larry punches up the Ring app and scrolls through the history. And bingo, there it is.
1:22:52 a.m. A large man in a yellow baseball cap is walking down the sidewalk, cursing a blue streak. As he draws even with the bottom our steps, he thrusts his right arm forward and with a loud F-YOU shoves the spruce so hard that the planter bounces when it hits the sidewalk.
A couple walking behind the man swings wide and leaves the spruce where it lies. We don’t blame them.
1:23:29 a.m. A group of almost-grown kids, laughing and talking happily among themselves, comes down the sidewalk. Awww, says one, someone knocked over that plant. I’ll get it, says another. He rights the planter and keeps going. We play the sequence over and over.
The man in the yellow cap? His sort of random urban nonsense is the reason we got Ring.
But the kids? Watching them makes me happy beyond reason. I am happy the man knocked over the planter so I can watch these kids pick it up.
There is good in the world. I’ve seen it on Ring.
