I was faced with quite a dilemma last week.
One of my customers left me a key, but set her alarm system.
As you can imagine my surprise when I entered the house and one minute later sirens were blaring from everywhere! I tried to contact the homeowner, but she did not answer my calls or return any texts.
This is not my first break-in. 😉 I’ve set off plenty of alarms in seven years of business. I know the drill. The alarm goes off for about five minutes and the police stop by to check on everything.
I explain my little predicament to the officer and thought, “Ok. They will turn off the alarm and we can get to work.”
And that would have been fine…had they turned off the alarm. The police didn’t have access to the homeowner’s security system. The security system sent out the police when the alarm went off, but the police could not reset the alarm.
Then about 30 minutes later, it stopped.
Ahh. Silence.
But, not for long.
Apparently the motion detector was also on, so once we started cleaning, the alarm would set off again. Therein lays my predicament. Do I stay or go? I had the check. I got the key like she told me to, but what kind of working condition is this for my employees and I?
I decided to suck it up and clean. Thank goodness my employees are super laid back and though we were all annoyed at the sound of the alarm, we powered through it.
About two hours later, the husband came home from work because the neighbors were complaining about the constant noise coming from the house.
He apologized and seemed frazzled saying the neighbors called him about an hour ago, but he couldn’t leave work. Of course I said it was OK and not a problem. We all screamed Hallelujah once he turned off the alarm and headed back to work.
Ahhh. Silence. For real this time!
Two weeks later, I returned to the house. The wife was there and was very apologetic. By that time, it wasn’t a big deal. I had one million other things on my mind and that wasn’t one of them. We did crack a joke on the way there about the alarm hopefully being turned off this time. (Hehe!)
So, what do you think? Did I do the right thing? Am I crazy for staying? Put yourself in the homeowner’s shoes. Tell me on Facebook if you think I made the right decision. www.facebook.com/Miraclean