NextDoorBell

So not long ago, we realized that our doorbell had stopped working at some point; we realized this because we noticed that it was no longer lighting up the way it’s supposed to. Even in daylight, it was pretty bright:

I think it’s pretty likely that, at some point, the wires for the doorbell got severed. This could’ve been when we had various repairs done to the roof and eaves, or it could be that I got the wires with the weed whacker since, weirdly enough, said wires apparently ran around the outside of the house and then into the garage through the gap between the garage door and the wall. But whatever the cause, the bells, they were no longer ringing.

Anyway, rather than try to figure out what happened to the wires, I decided to look at wireless doorbells. Not the fancy video camera kind, but the plain old push-a-button-and-make-a-sound kind. I mentioned this to my wife, and she said:

Wife: “Maybe we should get one of those video doorbells like everybody else has.”

So of course, that meant we were going to get one of those video doorbells like everybody else has.

I found one that was factory refurbished (I will pretty much always buy something factory refurbished if I can find it, because it’s, you know, better for the environment, not to mention that in this case it was about half the cost of a new one*), and because I didn’t want to have to bother with bringing the battery into the house to charge it all the time, I also got a little tiny solar panel for it to sit in. Technology! Soon, the video doorbell was hooked up, but of course, that left the question of what to do with the old, nonfunctional doorbell.

Wife: “People might just walk by the other doorbell and push the button on the one that doesn’t work.”

To take care of that, the first thing I did was get a large blank plastic faceplate to put in place of the previous doorbell. However, the previous doorbell was quite large, and the blank faceplate—the biggest one I could find—didn’t come close to covering the same surface area. Since the house had recently been repainted with the old doorbell in place, this left a rather large strip around it on all sides where the wall was the old color. Ugh.

Now I know what you’re thinking ― you’re thinking we could just paint the wall. And sure, we could do that. Or we could, you know, put the old doorbell back, and make sure nobody confuses it for an actual doorbell anymore. To wit:

Wife: “Somebody might still think it’s a doorbell and try to ring it.”
Me: “Anybody who’s stupid enough to mistake that bolt for a doorbell doesn’t deserve to have us answer the door.”

Once the Ring doorbell was hooked up and connected and we were signed in to the Ring app, we immediately started getting notifications from around the neighborhood of things other people with Ring doorbells saw or posted. These mostly consist of reports of porch pirates, thieves, mysterious visitors, “shady dudes”, “weird guys” coming to their doors, etc. etc. etc., with the occasional video of wildlife wandering by or such. This is almost entirely the exact same content of the social network NextDoor, to which I still inexplicably belong, because once in a while it contains something that’s actually interesting or useful (for instance, I get to say nice things about Tri-City Medical Center now and then because of their successful** efforts to help me not die during The Event), but mostly it seems to be people worried that strange cars are casing their neighborhood or whatever**.

Anyway, seeing as how the Ring “Neighbors” function seems to be pretty much more of the same, I figure we can just roll them up into a single entity named “NextDoorBell” and call it a day.

Oh, and of course, I’m not going to turn off the feed.

Then I would miss out on the videos of the coyotes and bobcats.

* See also “Jim is too cheap to spend $12 to play a joke on me.”
** Obviously.
*** Weirdly enough, the app that everyone used to be worried about making people paranoid and inspiring vigilantism, Citizen, is the one where I see the least amount of this content. Maybe they learned something when they got burned**** a few years ago for actually putting a bounty out on a misidentified arsonist.
**** No pun intended.