ohOne of my many guilty pleasures is lurking in my old home’s Facebook group. The New York apartment complex, which houses the population of a small town, is classified as natural retirement community, which means there are plenty of people in the group with time and energy to devote to petty disputes. The gossip is unrivaled and often a little unhinged. At one point there was a heated debate about contraceptive for pigeons that resulted in at least one person being banned.
Recently, a kind of mania has taken over the group. An influential neighbor found out about video doorbells quite late. When he bought one, he sparked a flood of people who bought the devices and monitored them obsessively for package thieves. Every other Facebook post now appears to be a photo of some hapless stranger taken by a video doorbell with a panicked caption that says “stranger danger.”
“This person with a huge bag stood outside my door for several minutes!!!” a post read. “CAREFUL!!!” Hours later, someone stepped in to explain that the suspicious intruder had no nefarious intentions; He was simply a delivery boy who had gotten lost. Crisis averted.
“Keep an eye out for this man!” advised another post, along with a close-up of someone’s face. “I was checking all the doors in my apartment!” Later, the person in question, an embarrassed resident of the building, clarified that they were not trying to rob anyone: they were just trying to figure out where an annoying noise was coming from. Another crisis was averted.
I’m not judging anyone. Not only are video doorbells an ethical minefield and a surveillance nightmare, they can also quickly drive you crazy. Video doorbell disruption syndrome, whose symptoms include paranoia, anxiety, and the compulsion to spy on neighbors, is an alarmingly easy condition to develop. I had a brush with that too. I once found myself performing a forensic analysis of my video files to see which neighbor was throwing out their trash outside my house on trash day. So while video doorbells are useful for avoiding Jehovah’s Witnesses, I think they are for the birds. Who, by the way, probably shouldn’t be on birth control.