I am sure that like us, many of you, have fur babies you have to leave behind when you travel the world. Some have favorite boarding places, others have pet sitters who bring your babies into their home, and then there are those, like us, who prefer to have their babies sleeping on their own beds while we are away.
If you have a live-in pet sitter, you are placing a special kind of trust in someone -- first, that they will love and take care of your babies, and secondly, treat your home and your belongings like their own. When the sitter is family or a close family friend, you never wonder -- but when you are hiring someone to provide a service in your home, how do you deal with the question of "Trust but Verify"?
In our case, our home came with some automated features, key among which is our digital, networked, keyless entry system. While ours is a Schlage lock equipped for Nexia networking, there are other companies that provide the same kind of capabilities. https://www.mynexia.com/login
First and foremost is the ability to establish multiple, named entry codes - e.g. Pet Sitter - Linda or Pet Sitter - Frank. With named entry codes, you know who and when someone enters your home. Second, let's say your pet sitter lost or forgot their code while you are away? All they have to do is text, email, or call you and you can let them in or lock the door while they are standing there by using your (in this case) Nexia app on your smart phone. So this is one way to audit comings and goings.
The other way is by installing a wired or wireless video camera. In our case, we bought a Drop Cam Pro and installed it to monitor comings and goings in our front drive way -- we specifically choose not to monitor things inside our home - with hacking the way it is these days, who would want to find out their daily lives are a new, live, HD reality show complete with audio? Like our door lock, the camera is also available for viewing on our smart phones, laptop, or ipad. Lastly, if you want an auditable record of your recorded video, you can purchase cloud storage -- which we did -- to ensure you keep a record of things. https://www.dropcam.com/dropcam-pro
So my reason for writing this blog entry at this time is that we just got back from a short cruise. Our pet sitter is someone we have used before who really seemed responsible and loving with our pets. This time, like last time, we took a quick look back home before leaving our INet connection in port, except this time - less than two hours after our leaving home, our pet sitter had left and not returned for more than 7 hours... This was most definitely not part of our agreement! Now the alarm bells are ringing and my wife is just about ready to get off the ship and head back home to rescue her babies.
Of course it got worse -- at our first port the next day -- we reviewed the video and door events finding that she'd been gone 8.5 hours and when she returned it was with another couple (also not agreed to) who brought two additional dogs into our home (our cat was really freaked when we got back). Turns out, everyone had a sleep over that evening and over the next 4 days it was more of the same. Wow - now we were wondering what had gone on the first time we used her and just did spot checks without recording while farther away in Europe???
At the end of the day, our dogs and cat are happy now that Mom and Dad are home -- they ate like they were starved and the cat came back out from under the guest room bed after 30 minutes of patient mommy coaxing.
But how do you handle it? I don't know if we are right or wrong but did not disclose beforehand that our door lock maintains an audit log, nor the fact that we monitor our driveway with a recording video camera. Nor did we disclose it when I talked with our pet sitter when we got home. All I said is that we have an extra-ordinarily close neighborhood -- which we do -- and neighbors across the street and on each side, who are friends and know our comings and goings. The names, addresses, and phone numbers of our neighbors are part of the information we leave with our pet sitters so they have someone to reach out to if something comes up.
Despite knowing this, someone we trusted, left our dogs locked in the house for extended periods of time with 1-2 additional dogs, while people we'd never met were sleeping over in our home. When gently confronted with these facts "gathered from observant and concerned neighbors..." our pet sitter immediately admitted screwing up and apologized profusely -- she was profoundly shaken by having lost someone's trust so completely. We won't hire her again but we aren't blasting her name and phone number across the internet because we believe she has learned a valuable lesson.
For our part, we will continue to use these tools as we travel the world, and ensure that before we leave our home in the care of the next pet sitter, we will have a discrete understanding about how long they can be away, where the pets will be while he or she is away, whether or not other people can visit (and for how long), and whether or not other pets can be introduced into the home while Mom and Dad are away.
Over and above the safety of your pets and security of your home, there are additional considerations you need to think about -- especially if you live in Florida. Many in Florida have pools in their backyards and over the years, enough kids drowned in these pools to require stringent safety legislation. We don't have young kids so as soon as we had the final inspection of our new pool, we took off the door alarms that squawked every time we opened our sliding glass doors. We don't have young kids nor grandkids so we weren't being negligent with respect to protecting our pool since it is completely enclosed with locked doors -- so the only way to the pool is through the home's (un-alarmed) patio doors. But let's say your pet sitter invites friends with kids or their grand kids over to your home while you're away? Guess who's going to be liable...
So Trust but Verify while you're Traveling the World...
If you have a live-in pet sitter, you are placing a special kind of trust in someone -- first, that they will love and take care of your babies, and secondly, treat your home and your belongings like their own. When the sitter is family or a close family friend, you never wonder -- but when you are hiring someone to provide a service in your home, how do you deal with the question of "Trust but Verify"?
In our case, our home came with some automated features, key among which is our digital, networked, keyless entry system. While ours is a Schlage lock equipped for Nexia networking, there are other companies that provide the same kind of capabilities. https://www.mynexia.com/login
First and foremost is the ability to establish multiple, named entry codes - e.g. Pet Sitter - Linda or Pet Sitter - Frank. With named entry codes, you know who and when someone enters your home. Second, let's say your pet sitter lost or forgot their code while you are away? All they have to do is text, email, or call you and you can let them in or lock the door while they are standing there by using your (in this case) Nexia app on your smart phone. So this is one way to audit comings and goings.
The other way is by installing a wired or wireless video camera. In our case, we bought a Drop Cam Pro and installed it to monitor comings and goings in our front drive way -- we specifically choose not to monitor things inside our home - with hacking the way it is these days, who would want to find out their daily lives are a new, live, HD reality show complete with audio? Like our door lock, the camera is also available for viewing on our smart phones, laptop, or ipad. Lastly, if you want an auditable record of your recorded video, you can purchase cloud storage -- which we did -- to ensure you keep a record of things. https://www.dropcam.com/dropcam-pro
So my reason for writing this blog entry at this time is that we just got back from a short cruise. Our pet sitter is someone we have used before who really seemed responsible and loving with our pets. This time, like last time, we took a quick look back home before leaving our INet connection in port, except this time - less than two hours after our leaving home, our pet sitter had left and not returned for more than 7 hours... This was most definitely not part of our agreement! Now the alarm bells are ringing and my wife is just about ready to get off the ship and head back home to rescue her babies.
Of course it got worse -- at our first port the next day -- we reviewed the video and door events finding that she'd been gone 8.5 hours and when she returned it was with another couple (also not agreed to) who brought two additional dogs into our home (our cat was really freaked when we got back). Turns out, everyone had a sleep over that evening and over the next 4 days it was more of the same. Wow - now we were wondering what had gone on the first time we used her and just did spot checks without recording while farther away in Europe???
At the end of the day, our dogs and cat are happy now that Mom and Dad are home -- they ate like they were starved and the cat came back out from under the guest room bed after 30 minutes of patient mommy coaxing.
But how do you handle it? I don't know if we are right or wrong but did not disclose beforehand that our door lock maintains an audit log, nor the fact that we monitor our driveway with a recording video camera. Nor did we disclose it when I talked with our pet sitter when we got home. All I said is that we have an extra-ordinarily close neighborhood -- which we do -- and neighbors across the street and on each side, who are friends and know our comings and goings. The names, addresses, and phone numbers of our neighbors are part of the information we leave with our pet sitters so they have someone to reach out to if something comes up.
Despite knowing this, someone we trusted, left our dogs locked in the house for extended periods of time with 1-2 additional dogs, while people we'd never met were sleeping over in our home. When gently confronted with these facts "gathered from observant and concerned neighbors..." our pet sitter immediately admitted screwing up and apologized profusely -- she was profoundly shaken by having lost someone's trust so completely. We won't hire her again but we aren't blasting her name and phone number across the internet because we believe she has learned a valuable lesson.
For our part, we will continue to use these tools as we travel the world, and ensure that before we leave our home in the care of the next pet sitter, we will have a discrete understanding about how long they can be away, where the pets will be while he or she is away, whether or not other people can visit (and for how long), and whether or not other pets can be introduced into the home while Mom and Dad are away.
Over and above the safety of your pets and security of your home, there are additional considerations you need to think about -- especially if you live in Florida. Many in Florida have pools in their backyards and over the years, enough kids drowned in these pools to require stringent safety legislation. We don't have young kids so as soon as we had the final inspection of our new pool, we took off the door alarms that squawked every time we opened our sliding glass doors. We don't have young kids nor grandkids so we weren't being negligent with respect to protecting our pool since it is completely enclosed with locked doors -- so the only way to the pool is through the home's (un-alarmed) patio doors. But let's say your pet sitter invites friends with kids or their grand kids over to your home while you're away? Guess who's going to be liable...
So Trust but Verify while you're Traveling the World...
