The following is an excerpt from the Monitoring Matters column featured in Security Sales & Integration magazine. Our Vice President of Technology and Innovation, Morgan Hertel, is a regular contributor and authored the article below.
When I first started in the alarm industry, the company I worked for had a small monitoring center. You could almost touch all sides of the room with both hands when sitting in the middle of the room.
It was manned with two people who were so close, they could hear each other breathing.
Back then, we had one protocol for all the intrusion alarms and all the information we fit on a 5×7 paper index card that was used to keep track of the various phone numbers and all the zones. Each card was filled out with a #2 pencil so you could erase it when a number or zone changed. Everything you needed was either in your head or on that card.
The protocol for burglary was simple: when you received an alarm, you called the police, then serially went through the call list to notify of an alarm. There were no cell phones, of course, but we had a few pagers, though they only emitted beep tones back then.
To read the full article, click here.
