Sally Breslin: My Life: I'M A REAL SUCKER FOR (CHEAP) HOME-SECURITY DEVICES

I hate to admit it, but because I'm always thinking about my safety, I often fall for infomercials that advertise home-security devices…especially the motion-activated ones.

One of them was a driveway alarm. The ad said it would send a signal to a receiver in my house that would emit a chime whenever a person or car was coming up the driveway. I thought it sounded like a great idea, not only for my protection, but also to reduce all of the jumping up and rushing to the front window I usually do whenever I'm expecting company or a repairman.

I probably should mention here that I can't afford state-of-the-art, high-tech products, so my purchasing power is always limited to...well, basically cheap stuff. I think I paid $14.95 for the driveway alarm.

It was made of plastic and consisted of two pieces – the outside motion detector and the indoor unit that received the signal and sounded the chime. Each operated on just regular alkaline batteries.

At first, I was surprised at how well the alarm worked. The day after I hung it up on a tree facing the driveway, a UPS delivery truck came up the driveway. Immediately a loud beeping sound, similar to when a construction vehicle backs up, blared out of the receiver on my kitchen counter. The dogs and I jumped, startled. But I was excited the device actually did what it was advertised to do.

It didn’t take long, however, for that excitement to wear off. Due to the fact the alarm was a motion detector, everything set it off – squirrels, deer, leaves blowing in the wind and even bugs crawling over the sensor. On really windy days, the receiver would beep about 10 gazillion times (give or take a few gazillion).

I wanted to toss a shoe at it.

Instead, I got into the habit of shutting it off on windy days, which kind of defeated the whole purpose for buying it.

Alas, the motion detector ended up falling off the tree and crashing to the ground during a windstorm, and its cheap plastic casing cracked open. I'd never liked that casing anyway because it was bright white. If the manufacturers wanted customers to conceal a warning device outside in the trees, then they should have colored it green or brown so it would blend in with its surroundings instead of practically announcing, "Hey! Look at me, a secret driveway monitor! You can't miss me!" to the entire neighborhood.

One year, during a period of only a few weeks, three houses in my neighborhood were broken into and robbed in the middle of the afternoon while the homeowners were at work. When I told my uncle about the robberies, he was concerned and said he was going to bring over something to protect my property. That was fine with me. In fact, I was hoping he’d arrive driving a flatbed truck carrying an eight-foot-high electrical fence with a couple hundred feet of razor wire coiled around the top.

He arrived with something called a stealth camera – a motion-activated surveillance device that had infrared capabilities for taking both daytime and nighttime photos. He attached the camera, which was encased in black, to the trunk of a tree facing the driveway and said it would capture any burglars or prowlers on film in crystal clarity.

I secretly hoped it also might capture something more exciting…like an extra-terrestrial…or Bigfoot – something I could sell to a tabloid for big bucks.

The next day was trash pickup day, so at sunrise I wheeled my trash containers out to the road. I threw on a jacket over my nightgown and didn’t bother to take the pink foam-curlers out of my hair or remove my furry purple slippers and put on shoes. No one was around at that hour anyway, so I wasn’t concerned about frightening someone into instant blindness.

After I deposited the trash containers at the end of the driveway, I walked back toward the house. At that hour of the morning, I still was half-asleep and yawning...a lot. That’s when I noticed a pale orange flash in the trees.

It took a few seconds for me to realize it was the stealth camera. I’d forgotten all about it! I also realized that I, in all of my hideous frumpiness, had just been captured on film. To make matters even worse, my mouth had been wide open in mid-yawn at the time. I bolted into the house before any more embarrassing photos could be snapped.

The problem was, my uncle hadn't explained to me how to erase photos in the camera or even how to remove the little card they were stored on. Sure, he'd left the instruction booklet with me, but I hadn't even opened it yet.

So if, at that very moment, a gang of burglars had come up the driveway and burst into my house, and the police needed the photo footage (with me still on it) as evidence, I wouldn’t have reported the crime. Sacrificing my TV, laptop and jewelry would have been a small price to pay to save myself from eternal humiliation.

I finally did learn how to open the camera and remove the card inside, pop it into my computer and erase it before inserting it back into the camera and resetting it. But it always was a struggle because the camera’s casing had several extremely tight external and internal snap-closures that prevented water from getting inside.

I did enjoy seeing all of the wildlife it captured, especially at night. But the camera ate up eight D-cell batteries every week, which turned out to be too much of a bother and expense for me to keep up with, so I finally quit buying batteries.

Now, years later, that old camera still is sitting out there, attached to the tree, and it serves a useful purpose as a nesting place for a colony of big black ants.

At least they figured out how to get inside the darned thing.

But I haven't given up. A few weeks ago I saw an advertisement for a set of Bell and Howell motion-detector spotlights on sale for a great price. They are solar-powered and need no wiring, so they can be placed anywhere, high up or low to the ground, with their purported super-powerful, blinding beams hitting and scaring off intruders (both two-legged and four-legged) who dare to set foot on the property after dark.

They sounded like a good idea to me, so I mentioned them to my friend and her husband.

"But you live in the middle of the woods and your house is surrounded by big trees that block out the sunlight," the husband said. "How do you expect to solar-power anything?"

Technicalities, technicalities.

I guess I'll just end up doing what my grandfather used to do on his farm to alert him if someone or something was out there – tie a string of tin cans about a foot off the ground from one side of the driveway to the other.

I'm pretty sure I can handle that.

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Sally Breslin is a native New Englander and an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net

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