I remember one time I was travelling. I called home and asked my house sitter how my dog was. He said, “The cat is dead.”
I couldn’t believe it. I told him you don’t spring that sort of thing on someone. He shoulda first told me that the cat had climbed up on the roof and wouldn’t come down. Maybe the next time I called, he could say he was concerned because the cat was still up there and hadn’t eaten. Then, maybe the next time, he could tell me the cat had died.
He said “Okay.” So I asked how my mother was doing. He replied, “Well, she’s up on the roof and won’t come down…”
Okay, I laughed. FTR, though, I meant the “beyond that”. I meant the possibility of someone (or several someones) creeping up on our property with the intent to do harm. I’m serious about security. When I’m driving back to the house, if there’s a car behind me (it’s not a busy road), I don’t pull into the lane; I keep going to the post office and pull into their parking lot. Go ahead and call me paranoid. There are a lot of people who don’t think of these things until after something bad happens.
**The wind of my soul **: Yeah, you’re right. Thank you.
Dinsdale: Haw, haw. Also, “No, you ain’t got three motherless children. They all died in the fire too!”
I’ve seen people who do that, and what that tells me is that having an alarm on the house while they sleep is important to them, not that ‘if you’re in the house and we aren’t it’s important to us to have the alarm on’. And…
I don’t see what this has to do with the house alarm. Presumably a carload of students breaking into the house to party would wake your housesitter up, so having the alarm warn him slightly sooner wouldn’t make much difference for him. And having a murderer decide to drag his victim to your house who’s at exactly the right mix of competence and incompetence to pick an out of the way house but not to disable the security system (which, in this case, I’m guessing uses a land line which is easy to cut) is… pretty unlikely.
I think you’re missing the fact that a lot of people just don’t consider an alarm on the house something that they need to feel safe in the house. It’s a big deal to you, but I doubt your housesitter spent much time worried about semi-competent murderers or college kids throwing random house parties.
You’re still using a land line with an answering machine, but you’re perplexed that someone else doesn’t screen with caller ID?
You haven’t said whether you went over these expectations with your friend before he agreed to house sit. And being a friend, it might have been more awkward to negotiate if he did not want to do some of them, but did not want to back out, or refuse to help you.
If you decide to use him as a house sitter again, you might want to discuss up front, before asking him to do it, whether he would be willing to keep the alarm set when he’s home, set it when he leaves, not answer the landline or mess with the messages, etc. Then you can either negotiate those requirements with him, or choose someone else who’s willing to do it.
My anecdote is the time my new boss, who happened to live a block away from me, asked me to house sit for 2 weeks. We knew each other slightly from before, but I’d only been working for him for about a week when he asked. He mentioned needing someone to turn the sprinklers on on a particular schedule, and that he had cable we were welcome to enjoy. I thought he just wanted someone to stop by every day, do the lawn watering, and keep the house looking lived in. The first day he was gone, when I went in the house, there was a note that made me realize he was expecting me to stay there the whole time. I had pets and a partner at my house, and didn’t want to live elsewhere for 2 weeks. So … awkward situation, particularly with him being my boss. I wound up splitting my time, doing partly what I’d planned and partly what he’d expected.
Also, another anecdote: After our house was broken into, my partner wanted an alarm. We got one. I discovered that alarms make me extremely anxious. The beeping between opening the door and disarming it make me feel like a bomb is about to go off. I absolutely hated having it turned on. I would probably not agree to stay at someone’s house for even a night if I was told up front that I had to use the alarm, if I had some other choice. Maybe your friend doesn’t feel as strongly as me but if it’s super important to you that it gets used, it’s definitely something to make clear up front and get agreement on.
Btw, every answering machine I’ve seen in the last 25 years has remote access. It mostly just stores spam messages now but even my crappy Vtech phone with built in answering machine has it. I never use remote access but I just looked up the user’s manual to double check.
Does your landline phone company allow you to forward your calls to another number? I’m guessing not, since you didn’t use that feature. If you have phone service from a local company, consider switching to a VOIP provider. It’s a way of providing phone service over the internet. They often come with every imaginable phone feature and will typically be cheaper than a local phone company. You can configure your phone to ring multiple numbers, forward to a different number, route all calls to the VOIP voicemail, and so on. They work with 911 service. I’ve been using VOIP for years without any problems. In fact, it is so reliable I once forgot which company I was using since I never had to interact with them.
Nah, uou’re not being unreasonable. There’s nothing wrong with your expectations. You hired a guy for a task, and he screwed up on parts that you believe are important. He definitely should not have been messing with the messages on the phone, and if you told him about the alarm, and he said he could do it, it’s not your responsibility to make sure he could, but his. If he can’t get it working, it’s up to him to either figure it out, or, yes, call you.
That he’s a friend only means you don’t need to cut him off as a friend. It doesn’t have anything to do with evaluating his performance. And, even then, it’s okay to decide that, since he did everything else right, those other things are small issues that you can work out next time–like tell him “don’t use my phone” and making sure he knows how the arm the alarm. Sure, security is important, but fixing the situation is fairly easy. As is fixing the deletion of messages. Saying you should never use him again is (in my mind) overkill for the level of mistakes.
And, finally, I’m surprised at the US response to “spaz.” I’d get a UK Doper saying it was offensive, because it is grossly offensive there. And I get maybe avoiding it because of the international audience. But, as far as I understood, the offensive meaning was only such in the UK, and it was considered not so bad in the US. So seeing who I believe are mostly US Dopers saying it is offensive surprises me.
So it seems that the same internationalism where “cunt” is becoming more offensive outside the US applies in the other direction. “Spaz” is becoming offensive in the US. I find that quite interesting. I thought it was just my idiosyncrasy to not use it, in case some UK person read it.
Since the original post has been covered and the thread has moved on to the personal-anecdotes phase:
We moved into this house 17 years ago. We have a summer cottage several hours away, and tend to go away for a month or more at time. We installed an alarm system for two reasons: 1) If the house caught fire while we were away, the fire department would automatically be called, and 2) if our daughter, who was scheduled to be a toddler in a couple of years, opened an outside door, we’d hear the chime and be able to get her back inside right away.
Seventeen years later and I still don’t know how to operate the alarm system. And I’m kind of afraid of fooling with it for fear I’ll mess something up.
