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Too safe to escape

A recent story I was told highlights how we still take security for granted in our daily lives. Most people try to ensure that their houses, townhouses and apartments have some form of security in place to protect them from burglaries and home invasions, but these solutions are often simply chosen because they were offered. How many of us really think about what security is in place for different scenarios?

What brought this to mind was a funny story about how someone locked himself in his bedroom and couldn’t get out. Well, it was funny to hear, probably less funny and very costly to experience.

This individual is very security conscious, so much so that friends generally consider him to be paranoid. So one evening he went to bed after checking that his house was locked up and alarmed. As usual, he also locked the bedroom door – just in case.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, as he locked the door the key broke. Fortunately, he had his cellphone with him and was able to call someone to help. Of course, that someone had to get into the house and disarm the alarm to get the spare key which was locked in a cabinet and the cabinet’s key was hidden somewhere else. This meant the person would have to break in, or as they ended up doing, getting a locksmith to get through the back door.

Being security minded, however, the individual had bolted the door from the inside, which meant damaging the door to get in, even after the locksmith had bypassed the usual locks. Then they found that the spare key didn’t work because the door was ‘half-locked’, according to the locksmith. So it was a couple of minutes more of locksmithing before he was free – with an after-hours bill from the locksmith and the need to buy a new door and locks.

I asked him why he didn’t just escape out of a window instead of being trapped for nearly three hours? Well, he couldn’t as there were bars covering the entire window, not just the opening ones, so even breaking a window was pointless. “So what if there had been a fire and your bedroom door was unusable?”, I then asked.

So the question I asked myself, and am now asking you is: Does your security protect you from intruders only, or do you have a plan to escape if the unthinkable happens (or in this case, the ludicrous – who thinks a bedroom door key will break for no reason)?

Are you so secure you’re too safe to escape?

Correction

In the May issue of Hi-Tech Security Solutions we managed to print an article that belonged to a past era. The article in question, Upgraded video management system, was an old one from 2014 that found its way into the current edition and the individual mentioned is no longer with the company. Hi-Tech Security Solutions apologises for the error.

Andrew Seldon

Editor

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