Security Issues

Security is an issue.  I’ve recently been tasked, by my wife, with recruiting 10,000 guards to look after our daughter, but it turns out that even though the deadline is coming up very soon, I’ve had to come clean and admit that due to massive administrative complexities I only managed to recruit around 6 thousand and that the rest of the guards have to be conscripted in from the public sector.  I’ve owned up, and I held daily meetings with my wife to keep her fully abreast of the situation, but somehow she doesn’t seem to have read the memo that I put at the bottom of her briefing documents written in size 3 Wingdings which explained the numbers in detail.

Hang on, that’s not actually true, just something that I’ve heard from somewhere.  Anyway, security is an issue in our house as our daughter is at the age where she can put Houdini to shame with her feats of escapology.  Seriously, I have found her in situations that would push Jonathan Creek to drink. I still have no idea how, when she was quite a bit younger, she managed to climb up and out of her cot, and make it to the floor without damaging herself.  Perhaps it has something to do with that radioactive spider she was bitten by?
What I’m really trying to say is that my daughter could probably quite easily foil some of the better security systems in the world.  Think 10,000 guards could stop her?  Well don’t be surprised if she turns up and runs Usain a close second on August 5th.  You’ll know which one she is, she’ll be the one not in running gear running in lane 8 ½ asking if this is the way to the library.

I really think, given the right motivation, she could do it.  Unfortunately, with this in mind, I have a confession to make.  I probably couldn’t get a job at G4S even if I turned up and promised to bring 3,500 of my closest mates with me.  I’m just a little bit too forgetful to be one of the world’s truly great security guards, I probably wouldn’t even get a podium finish.  So it won’t come as a surprise when I say that we have had a few mishaps.  Given her propensity for getting into places that she shouldn’t, and mine to forget that I should even try to stop her it’s astonishing that I haven’t let something terrible happen to her.  As it is there have only been two really quite serious happenings.

Firstly, before we get into those let me take you on a tour around the old chateau.  As you walk in the front door, stepping over the piles of paper and clothes and shoes which habitually litter the threshold, you will note our stairs to your left, on the side of which is housed the key pad for our alarm.  Then on your right you can go into the living room.  Please don’t injure yourself as you make your way through the barbed wire effect created by all the scattered toys.  If you don’t enter the living room but carry on down the hallway you can turn right into the dining room and then on into the kitchen.  That’s the downstairs, and I’m not going to show you upstairs because that’s where we keep all the serious mess.

This particular morning I was not feeling at my most bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but that’s usually sorted by coffee and breakfast.  I was also in charge of the little girl while my wife had a shower upstairs.  So down we went, away the alarm blared, I rushed to placate it with a propitiatory offering of the correct code and sure enough it was appeased enough to quieten down.  I then put the child down and began to open up downstairs, drawing curtains and the like.  I made my way through to the kitchen, doing a little victory dance for achieving a record breaking time for getting downstairs and turning the alarm off (only 7 beeps.  It’s important to give yourself these little challenges you realise.)

Victory dance over, kettle boiling, cereal of champions in the bowl it was time to put the child in her chair to have her breakfast.  Only, it turned out the child hadn’t just followed me as I had been blithely assuming she had.  No, instead she had taken advantage of the fact that in my rush to do the alarm, and in my little congratulatory ecstasy that followed, I had completely forgotten to close the stair gate.  We had had our first security breach of the morning and this one was entirely down to human error. 

She had rushed back up the stairs to try and discover why mummy had left her with this dancing buffoon at such a critical time as breakfast.  Thus mummy was rudely disturbed from her shower, first by a little girl poddling in and demanding an audience, and then by a crashing fool barging in to warn her that the daughter had come upstairs.  Upon finding the two together, both looking disapprovingly at me, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour, whisked N away from my wife, apologised, told her to get back in the shower and ran back downstairs (if only the alarm had been set that time, I reckon I really could have smashed the record), deposited the little girl in the chair and told her that next time if she could not illuminate daddy’s shortcomings quite so much he would really appreciate it.

Disaster averted, lessons learnt, time to move on, except for that other occasion, when almost exactly the same thing happened, only this time I managed to get the daughter before she had gone more than 6 or 7 steps up.  You see, I am learning.  One of these days I’ll have it sussed, and we will have a house that would put Fort Knox to shame.  Until then I will just have to keep going, and hope that the training from G4S finally comes.