The $16,000 Email

June 27, 2001 - Recently our Tech Support group received a grateful ’thank you email’ from a man who found that he had caught more on tape than he meant to, and he was glad about it.

Jeff Parker ordered the VCR Commander kit, and wrote in to Tech Support asking for help in getting his cameras and motion sensors set up. The Tech Support team worked with him, and talked him through the setup process, and then asked him to set up a test, check back in with them and let them know how everything worked.

With their help, Jeff was able to set up the wireless camera, and as a test, he set the camera to catch him leaving the driveway in the morning, and then returning later in the afternoon. So everything was set up, and Jeff was on his way.

"It turned out that I forgot something so I had to return home about two hours later," Jeff said. So "Just for fun I looked at the VCR to see if it was recording." Jeff had just passed the motion sensor on his way in, so this would be a perfect test.

The VCR was moving, and Jeff was thrilled. But then he noticed something didn’t look quite right. The tape counter on the VCR was much further forward than it should have been. Thinking he forgot to rewind the tape prior to his test, Jeff played it in fast reverse to see if it had recorded him as he drove away that morning.

"To my surprise," Jeff said, "it was not me on the tape. It was a truck!" Jeff watched on his tape as a pickup truck drove up his driveway, then into the backyard. Once there, two men got out of the truck and loaded Jeff’s telescoping radio antenna tower which he had been storing behind his house. "I just about fell over in shock," Jeff said. "I went outside to investigate, and sure enough it was missing." Someone had stolen sixteen thousand dollars worth of equipment.

"Not only did one security camera justify its existence forever," Jeff said, "but it did it in the first two hours of the first day."

And to answer the question that’s on everybody’s mind at this point, "Yes," Jeff was able to identify the men on tape. He got the tower back, and the men are currently being reprimanded by the local police department.

To quote Jeff one last time, "Then everybody (except the two guys in the truck) lived happily ever after." Jeff says that he still doesn’t have the lawnmower back, but that’s another story. One that’s also bound to be an upcoming X10 feature.

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