My wife and I recently went to China for a week. While we were gone, the burglar alarm was triggered in our home. We have a security monitoring company, who called the home, then my wife, then my cell. Since we were in the air at the time, we didn't answer. Their next escalation point was the Redmond Police, who informed them that they refused to check out the home since we hadn't paid the annual $10 "home with a burglar alarm" fee. I was a little annoyed at this--partly because of the fee (which we weren't aware of at all), partly because the alarm company didn't disclose this info nugget at the time of our contract signing. The Redmond Police were nice enough to send us the form in the mail after rejecting our monitoring company's plea for help. Unfortunately, they didn't mail it to April, 2005, so there's not much we can do besides pay it and hope there is no more red tape for next time.
Most of the people I've told about this have said things like "you have to pay the police extra money to do their job!?!" The reality is that we didn't know about it, but that doesn't absolve us. But what really annoys me is that they could have served and protected in a much more effective way if they had checked out the house this time and sent us the form afterwards. If we didn't pay the fee, then they could refuse next time. I wish there was a way to ensure we were covered in all the ways we take for granted (hence the need for a RPS Universal subscription). Now we need to contact the fire department to make sure they would check out a fire alarm, etc.
We happened to be lucky and weren't missing anything--if someone had tried to break in, they were probably scared off by the alarm. If you're in a similar situation, you might want to make sure you're covered.
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