Security Matters

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

I had a habit of "making the rounds" around the apartment complex in which I live before going to bed. And sometimes, if I woke in the middle of the night, I would pull on a pair of shorts and "make the rounds" again. Partly this is driven by the fact that I have found most people tend to just ignore things that are "not my problem", and in some cases assume they will be blamed for something if they do report it.

An example is that one day I was heading out to my car when I heard this great racket coming from the Laundry room. When I got there, I found water spraying everywhere, and fairly clear signs that someone had grabbed their laundry and departed. It was clear that the water had been spraying for a while (whether hours, or just an hour I could not tell, but definitely more than a few minutes). I contacted manager and got instructions on where to go to cut the water flow.

But there have been other incidents.

One night as I was returning to my own apartment, a young lady burst out of hers and nearly ran into me. She was terrified that someone had been looking into the window of her apartment from the alley behind the complex (into her bedroom). It was pretty obvious to me that by the time she had made the cause of her distress known, whatever had triggered it would be gone, but I still marched back to investigate. A careful search for recent signs of disturbance did not turn up anything, but that did not mean that she imagined it. At least the idea that someone would go back and investigate made her feel a little more secure.

I often joke that I am that guy you see in horror films. The one that first hears "the strange noise", goes to investigate . . . and never comes back.

Different people have owned the apartment complex in the years I have been there, all of them have gotten to know that if I see a problem, I tend not to let it get worse but at minimum (if I cannot stop it from getting worse) I will report it to them. Most of the problems have, as you might imagine, been water related. (Including a time when I literally heard the pipe burst while I was nearby.) But I have also reported wind damage (a fence that had been so weakened the next blow would probably bring it down, which was principally a problem in that it might damage cars parked nearby, for example).

In a way I am being preemptively defensive in that things that increase the costs of operating the apartment complex will eventually show up as increased costs to the denizens of the complex (which includes me).