One night last May, I went to dump a bin bag in the outside bin and got a nasty surprise: the bin was full of cat poo and stunk to high heaven! I don’t own a cat, but there are plenty living in my street. They slink through my back garden so often, I’ve given them names: ‘James Bond Cat’ is fluffy, white and malevolent-looking; ‘Michael Jackson Cat’ has white socks.
However, I may not own a cat, but I do own a trusty Ring Doorbell camera, and I pay an £80 ($100) subscription fee each year for the footage. (Ring's subscription plans have just been updated, but Ring cameras are also extra cheap this time of year!)
So I opened the Ring app and went through hundreds of video clips, hoping to catch the culprit.
Lo and behold: at 23:31 on Friday 10th May, an hour at which I’m always asleep, a slim youth in a tracksuit, socks and sliders (a fashion crime!) came and emptied an entire tray of cat litter, complete with droppings, into my black bin. Like me, he was Asian; unlike me (alas), he appeared to be around 18 years old.
So, fired up with indignation and outrage at my newly-smelly bin, I turned amateur detective. Clutching my phone, I stalked up and down the street, ringing doorbells and showing the neighbours the footage. I asked them if they knew of a household with an Asian youth and a cat.
Eventually, I got to the right house, where a middle-aged Asian man opened the door. ‘Do you have a cat?’ I asked. Yes, they did. ‘Do you have a son in his teens?’ He nodded, perplexed.I showed him the footage, at which point he angrily bellowed his son’s name and ordered him to clean out my bin.
Being 16, he didn’t exactly clean it (do 16-year-old boys know how to clean?) but he did empty it of cat poo. It still reeked, but at least the bin men wouldn’t refuse to empty it anymore.
He also left behind a full roll of bin bags, which always come in handy.
His excuse for dumping his cat litter in my bin? ‘I didn’t think anyone was living there.’I’d lived there for 19 months at the time, so was confused: was it just that the lights had been off?
He apologised: ‘I’m very sorry.’
I nodded magnanimously: ‘It’s okay. Just don’t do it again.’
It hasn’t happened since, but if I hadn’t had my Ring camera, he could have dumped the cat poo weekly and I’d never have been able to catch the offender. So I'm grateful to Ring and Amazon: these days, my bin is wonderfully fragrant and there are no remnants of its traumatic faecal past.
In any case, this really is the week to have a look at some of Ring's cameras and try it out for yourself as Amazon's big deals have already started and you can spend surprisingly little to try the tech for yourself.
