Late Doorbells
Story Time:
Two days after christmas, just before 11:00 pm, the doorbell rings.
Reader, I cannot stress enough how unusual this. In the fifteen years we’ve lived here, I think I can count on one hand many times the doorbell has rung after dark, and never closing in on midnight.
My particular middle-class suburb is not a part of town where people are “out and about”. We don’t get a lot of solicitors of any variety, this particular suburb isn’t on the way to anywhere, it’s not between things, the demographics skew older. People out on the street at all is unusual. This day in particular seemed to have a lot of people around; family around for the holiday, presumably? There had been lots of “teen voices” all evening, with a a real “home on break and bored” quality. Not a problem, but like I said, unusual.
(By comparison, back when I lived in the party central portion of a college town, an evening without teen voices sounding like they were mid-prank would have been the unusual one.)
But: the doorbell. Unusual. Unnerving. There is absolutely no good reason for someone to have rung that bell.
We don’t open the door, but through the window, there’s a kid standing there, somewhere in the 18–20 range, hoody over his head, holding some kind of a box or something. Can we help you? He says something we can’t quite hear about a charity or a church and an iPad giveaway? The thing he’s holding could be an iPad box. This has a real door-to-door scam vibe, but, at 11 at night? Strange on it’s own merits, and again, really out of character for this neighborhood. We yell “no thank you honey, have a nice night” through the window, he moves on. Strange!
My house is at the top of a T-junction, and between that and with where my house is on the lot, there’s a window upstairs where I’ve got a really clean view up and down the street in all three directions. I’m curious, so I stroll upstairs and watch to see where the kid goes. He’s across the street. The neighbors there don’t open the door either, he moves on. Meets up with four other kids that are also out and about in the streets, have a conversation I can’t hear in the middle of the intersection. Stranger.
As a group, they all move on to the next house. The same kid that came to our door goes up to that door. The other kids in in the group hides behind bushes and around corners. What? At this point I start weighing my options pretty fast. Should I go yell at them? Call the police? What the hell are these kids doing?
Then they all pull out their phones and turn the cameras on, and it hits me: they’re fucking prank youtubers!
C’mon kids, not cool. Long irritated sigh. I want to go out and pull the kids aside and say something like “look, we all moved out to the ‘burbs specifically to avoid shit like this.” Like, I’m not going to call the cops on these kids, but someone will. And, to put it politely, I can think of at least two people down the street the direction they’re moving who are likely to unload a shotgun through the door if a strange teenager rings the doorbell close to midnight.
Our HOA has retained the services of a “private security company,” whose whole job seems to be to orbit the neighborhood and frown at people. I poke around to see if we have the number to for them; this is pretty much exactly what those twerps are supposed to be for, roll up in their official-looking car and yell “what are you doing” out of the window. Can’t find it.
At this point I’m stomping around the living room flapping my arms in irritation. I feel like the neighborly thing to do is to help find a way to stop these kids from waking up any more retired people without them getting shot by the cops, but no real ideas are coming to me. There’s this deeply irritating sense of, really? On top of everything else, we have to deal with this too? Do we need bouncers for neighborhoods now?
Right at this point a police cruiser roars by the house with its lights going in the direction the kids were walking. Couldn’t see what happened after that.