Dave Barry - Homes And Other Black Holes

I happen to be an expert in the area of home security, because I live in South Florida, home of Miami Vice, where guns are extremely easy to obtain. Down here they give you a free revolver when you buy a Big Gulp at the 7-Eleven. So you have a lot of people walking around armed, the result being that a lot of homeowners feel that they, too, need to arm themselves in self-defense. Of course your bleeding—heart—liberal secular-humanist left-wing communists will tell you that it’s a bad thing to own a gun, but as any knowledgeable gun nut will tell you, there are countless factual anecdotes concerning alert gun-toting homeowners who have thwarted the forces of evil.

For example, we recently had a case here where a homeowner woke up at 2:30 A.M. because he thought he had heard a noise in the family room. Grabbing his revolver, he slowly opened his bedroom door and crept stealthily into the darkened hallway, where he stepped barefooted onto a cockroach—down here we get cockroaches large enough to derail trains—causing him (the homeowner) to leap straight into the air and shoot his gun, the bullet from which went through the wall and into the garage, where it hit the circuit breaker box and cut off the electrical power to the house, thus shutting down the videocassette recorder in the family room, where the homeowner’s eleven-year-old son had been watching Debbie Does Dallas. So don’t try to tell me that guns have no place in the home. Don’t try to tell it to the Founding Fathers of this nation, either. For one thing, they are dead. For another thing, they specifically considered the question of guns when they wrote the Constitution, and after much debate, they agreed on the following unequivocal wording regarding the right of the people to keep and bear arms:

ARTICLE XMZXMZBX: If guns were outlaws, then outlaws would be guns..lm-10

So you can play it any way you want it, but this is one homeowner whose motto is: “You can have my gun when you threaten to pry one of my fingers off the trigger.”

Of course, if you do get a gun, you need to follow certain basic safety procedures, such as:

1. Don’t keep it loaded.

2. Don’t even have the proper caliber of bullet for it.

3. Keep it someplace safe, such as a safe-deposit box in Switzerland.

What other steps can you take to protect yourself? One approach that combines the advantage of costing a lot of money with the advantage of really ticking off your neighbors is ...

Essentially, this is a complex system of modern, sophisticated, state-of-the-art, fully computerized components, costing no more than several semesters at Stanford University graduate school, yet giving you the sense of security and well-being that comes from knowing that everyone in your neighborhood will be instantly alerted by a horrible ear-splitting noise whenever lightning strikes anywhere within 137 miles of your home. Invariably this will happen at night when you’re out of town, so that your neighbors will get to lie in bed, listening to the piercing sound, which is only fair because it makes up for all the nights when you had to listen to their burglar alarm systems.

I do not mean to suggest that burglar alarm systems go off only when lightning strikes. No, they also go off when the electric company has problems, or when homeowners forget to turn them off upon returning. Sometimes birds set them off. “Let’s go set off some burglar alarms!” is a cry frequently heard among adolescent finches. Even air molecules, which are plentiful in the suburbs, can set off burglar alarm systems. In fact, the only thing that doesn’t set them off, as far as we can tell, is burglars. Nobody can explain this phenomenon, but police rely on it when they go on their patrols. They’ll drive through a neighborhood at 4 A.M., listening to three or four home security systems electronically whooping and shrieking into the night, and they’ll say to each other, using hand signals so they can be understood over the din:

“Everything’s fine here!”

Of course these systems are not perfect. Even the most well-designed electronic device cannot be relied upon to go off without any reason one hundred percent of the time. Thus most security experts also recommend that you have a backup system consisting of ...

I realize that in the chapter on housecleaning I specifically said you should never have a dog, on the grounds that they are filthy, but my feeling, as a professional author, is that if I go through life worrying about what I may have said in previous chapters, I will never get anything done. So in this chapter, I am strongly in favor of dogs as security devices, but I stress that they must be large. You don’t want one of those repulsive little yapping “lap”-style dogs that look like fur-covered insects, because the burglar will simply stuff it down the garbage disposal. This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t do you any good, home-securitywise. What you want is a major hunk of canine muscle, the kind that is always on Full Red Alert, the kind that will race to the front door, barking violently, when it hears any sound, including its own parasites.

We are blessed with such a dog, Earnest, and she is a source of great comfort to us, for we know that as long as we have her, our home is totally protected from Zachary Liebman, age five. This is the little boy who lives next door and comes over to play with our son. Earnest absolutely hates him. When we moved in, Earnest received signals from whatever distant planet it is that dogs get their instructions from, and these signals told her that Zachary Liebman is the most dangerous creature in the galaxy, and there is nothing we can do to change her mind. Zachary has come over to our house almost daily for two years now, and still she follows him around, emitting a constant low growl to let him know that she is ready in case he suddenly pulls out a concealed machine gun. And so of course we have to follow her around, going “NO! Earnest, NO!!” although this has no effect, because in matters of home security, Earnest takes orders only from the Dog Planet. So we form a colorful and loud procession—Zachary, oblivious; Earnest, furious; and my wife or me, slowly going hoarse—parading around the house, sometimes for hours. You can’t put a price on this kind of piece of mind.

None of the security methods we have discussed here will foil the truly determined burglar, the veteran professional who has already broken into hundreds of homes just like yours and has been convicted seventeen times and is currently out of jail on his own recognizance. The best you can hope for, with any security method, is that you will make your home look slightly less attractive to the burglar, so that he’ll pass you and burglarize somebody else’s house. In fact, you might leave a little note on your door, letting the burglar know that your particular house is probably less attractive to him than several other homes in your neighborhood where you know for a fact that the owners are away on vacation. Sure, this means extra work for you, but society has no chance against the Criminal Element if people like yourself aren’t willing to “get involved.”

If you go away for any length of time, be sure to leave a radio on in your house tuned to a station that plays “rap” music, so that if a burglar does get in, most of his brain cells will be killed instantly and he won’t be able to remember how to get back out.

Also you should ask a neighbor to come around and collect your mail and your newspapers, put out your garbage, and while he’s at it, maybe mow your lawn and paint your house and build a deck out back. Hey, it’s worth a shot.