My alarming personality

How I miss those Bombay chowkidars, hawaldars and mukadums! They look after your offices and homes so quietly and efficiently.

Not so in western countries. In Sydney there are alarm systems everywhere; from shopping centers to banks, bookshops, even in bathrooms and toilets! And they are so temperamental. I don’t like them and they don’t like me.

I often wonder whether I am the only person who sets off security alarms! I do as I enter supermarkets, bookshops, pharmacies, magazine shops… And it’s a worry.

I remember the first time it happened. It was at a departmental bookstall last year. I thought I would be body searched as I had no bag but the security man just looked at me, smiled and let me enter and exit.

I must add that the alarms I set off are in gentle tones and not the ear-splitting screeches of your home security system which robbers set off in the middle of the night.

Since then it has become routine. The sales girls look up suspiciously at first, then see my "respectable” face, smile and let me go, no questions asked. Now they don’t even look suspicious.

When I told this to my friend Meena whom I met outside a suburban supermarket she would not believe me. So I did my act, entered that supermarket, alarm bells ringing and exited with those alarms giving me a cheerio.

But hardly anyone looked at me as Meena stood transfixed. It inspired me to be a comedian and in true Jerry Lewis style chanted, "alarm bells for going in, alarm bells for going out, alarm in, alarm out” as I went in and out half a dozen times.

Although Meena was cracking up with laughter, no sales person, security guard, manager, trolley carriers… even raised their head. Some of the shoppers in the queue looked up but more in annoyance than in panic.

Why do I set off alarms? First I thought it was because I carried my office electronic swipe card in my pocket. But even without the swipe card, I made bookshops, news agencies and supermarkets abuzz with the sound of mild alarm music.

Or is it because I had undergone bypass surgery in 1990s and perhaps a scalpel or needle left behind by error had surfaced after seven years, a sort of seven-year itch?

Whatever the reason, the important issue is: Why install an expensive alarm system when hardly anyone heeds to it?

I admit I have an honest face and I don’t run away at the first peal of alarm. But does that establish my innocence? Don’t all — well, most — master criminals have honest faces?

Can’t a well-dressed, charming person enter a bookshop or a supermarket, pocket a few expensive items, walk out smilingly, stop surprised at the alarm, tell the salesman how he hates modern technology and nonchalantly chat at the gate with a friend, well, in this case an accomplice?

I have still to pass an airport security net. But the thought is alarming, if you will excuse the pun. Would I be allowed to leave the country if I were to set off an alarm? Would I be body searched? Or x-rayed in case a surgeon has absent-mindedly left within my bypassed artery a button battery from an electrical shop, a price tag from a book or the worst case scenario, a tiny object of mass destruction from a wholesaler?

The possibilities are endless but the mystery remains unsolved.

Let me go back to my original question. Am I the only human who is at war with security systems? If you are in this elite group, please write to me and we can form a ZAAA (Zoroastrian Australian Alarm Anonymous) Society.

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