Large Fierce Mammal

Every word in the following article is the personal opinion of its author, but every statement made within it can be supported with authenticating documentation. The author regards public safety and security, particularly that of his own clients, as matters not to be trifled with in these troubled times, and sincerely hopes that the brutal honesty of this review will encourage Safe Harbour Security to improve its business practices and quality of service before something really bad happens.

I’ve been a security professional since 1981, and started the company called Whynacht Security & Survival in 1983. Beginning in 1984 I started offering alarm monitoring services for my clients through my own emergency operations centre in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and over the period from 1984 to 2001 I grew that facility into what became known to the world as “Central Dispatch”,  encompassing not only the monitoring of alarm systems, but also dispatching for the Lunenburg-Mahone Bay Police Service, five Lunenburg County fire departments, and an assortment of municipal public works departments. Central Dispatch had an incredible reputation and seriously kicked ass. When the Lunenburg-Mahone Bay Police service disbanded and its members were absorbed into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 2001, three years later than anticipated, I decided to get out of the emergency services dispatch business. Overseeing a high performance operation like Central Dispatch comes at a cost if the job is to be done right, and I was quite simply tired. I did, however, need to continue providing uninterrupted alarm monitoring services for my clients, so the next step was to locate and hire a company specializing in that type of service that could meet the high standards already established by Central Dispatch.

For a number of years that company was Sydney, Nova Scotia based Breton Business Centre that operated an alarm monitoring centre called “BBC Central”. I was extremely happy with the service I got from BBC. I also liked their policy to only monitor signals sent to their station from clients of other companies, and to refrain from owning any such accounts of their own on the grounds that this would put them in direct competition with the companies that hired them.

Then one day BBC informed me that the business was up for sale, and a few months later the word came down that it had been sold to a company located in Halifax, Nova Scotia called Safe Harbour Security. The news came with lots of soothing sounds from BBC management promising that the sale wouldn’t affect the status quo in any negative way, and that the Sydney monitoring station would remain operational as always. It was all supposed to be business as usual – except it wasn’t; and on top of it all it didn’t take me long to come to the belief that Safe Harbour Security wasn’t all that troubled about owning their own monitoring accounts. Big red flag there.

Leading up to the day when Safe Harbour Security took full control and integrated the Sydney station with their Halifax operation, we got news from BBC that they were in the process of changing the software used to process alarm signals from the old tried and true Sims software to something new they called “Manitou”. The transfer of our client files from Sims to Manitou was supposed to be seamless – except it wasn’t.

I had access to both the Cape Breton Sims server and the Halifax Manitou server so I could ride shotgun on files being set up on Manitou, and right from the get go I formed the opinion that whoever was creating the Manitou files was a drooling imbecile who shouldn’t even have been allowed to be in the same town a monitoring station was in, let alone actually inside the same building. Client names, names of emergency contacts, community and road names were routinely misspelled. Telephone numbers were often wrong. Information identifying whether or not a person’s telephone number listed on the file was a residence, business, or cellular number was either wrong or missing altogether. Community and road names were wrong or left out, and as if all that wasn’t enough, the police, fire, and ambulance services listed for our clients were only rarely correct, and in some cases weren’t even in the  right province. Basically everything necessary to ensure timely, accurate delivery of emergency service was completely buggered. This did not bode well for the future. I decided that I would sign a service agreement with Safe Harbour Security at about the same time that Hell froze over, and set about getting ready for a mass move of all my clients out of what was by the moment looking more and more like a disaster waiting to happen.

My understanding was that the Sims system in Cape Breton would be kept in operation until the kinks were worked out of Manitou – except it wasn’t quite like that. It became obvious that I would have to do something fast, and as a stopgap measure while I finished checking out other service providers, I was assured by the old trusty BBC crew that they would watch over my accounts using the Sims system. I’m happy to report that this was actually what happened, but only after a week of e-mail correspondence between me and the Cape Breton station in which I was promised, “… we are double and triple checking everything to make sure we do not miss anything.” Problems snowballed, and operations at BBC seemed to be melting down into a big puddle of shit. Caller ID that is automatically detected by the alarm receiving system began tagging my traffic with telephone numbers that were completely whacky. For example, an elderly client in Lunenburg seemed over night to have relocated his house complete with security system 100 kilometers east to Halifax, and he wasn’t the only one.  After a lot of digging I discovered that the cause of this was actually that traffic from some other security company’s clients was somehow making its way into my data stream so that my clients were being called about incidents that were actually happening somewhere else in someone else’s territory, and I have no idea what was happening to the other poor bastards who were actually experiencing emergencies while the monitoring station was calling the wrong people. On top of that, routine daily self-test signals transmitted every night by our systems that were supposed to be noticed only if they actually failed to be received suddenly were being acted on by monitoring station staff as fire or panic alarms so that volunteer fire departments and police units were being called out in the middle of the night to closed businesses or houses with sleeping people inside who had no idea what the hell was going on. It took two days for me to diagnose that the cause of this was a misinterpretation of the self-test by the Manitou system that, for reasons previously stated, wasn’t supposed to be relied upon to process my traffic in the first place. Yet again, I figured it out myself because my contact at BBC was completely flummoxed as to the cause or any possible fix. By the time this got resolved, some volunteer fire departments had been dispatched on three consecutive nights, all because a routine self-test was misidentified by a quirky, piece of shit computer program that was clearly beyond the control and understanding of its users.

I started getting disturbing phone calls and e-mails from confused clients who wanted to report a sudden downturn in service quality. One nursing home administrator who had been running an emergency exercise at her facility wrote, “Yesterday when I tried to connect with you to let you know that the exercise was over and we would like to be reconnected again it took our maintenance man three tries to get a hold of somebody in your company. Did something change? That does not seem safe in an emergency. Please advise.” The “you” she was referring to was our good old monitoring staff, but the buck stops with me.

Yet another was informed by the monitoring station that her password, used to authenticate yourself after an accidental alarm, was not on file. It was on file in the Sims system, but the password never made it to Manitou. The result: another bullshit call for the RCMP that could easily have been avoided, and I had another confused and upset client.

While juggling all the bags of shit the sale of BBC to Safe Harbour Security had given me to hold, I had also made finding and hiring a new service provider my single goal in life.  The company I ultimately chose has turned out over the past year to be right up there with the excellent work BBC Central did for me when they were running at their best, and then some. My clients have been remarking regularly on how fast and accurately their signals are being acted on and calling to ask what I changed. As I always say, nothing succeeds like success. I am also now able to provide my clients with additional related services free of charge that I formerly had to bill for because I myself had to pay for them. I guess you can tell I’m rather happy with my selection.

But there’s a darker side to all this. Safe Harbour Security wasn’t all that pleased when I voted against them with my feet, and even though their service was ass and I was fully within my rights to abandon what was left of BBC as a lost cause, they said that if I would only pay them a laughably huge amount of money, they would gladly work with me to fix what they themselves had fucked up in the first place. All this and they didn’t even offer to kiss me first.

Since they bought BBC Central, and thereby had complete access to the list of clients that used to be monitored there, they were able to send a letter to a lot of my clients claiming that their monitoring service would be terminated in March 2010 if they didn’t pay Safe Harbour Security for services Safe Harbour Security wasn’t even providing. Never mind that none of the recipients of those libelous letters had any idea who or what Safe Harbour Security was. Meanwhile, they also continued to bill me for monitoring services they weren’t providing so that their bogus account grew constantly until it reached ludicrous proportions.

I have a very close relationship with my clients unlike many security companies that pretty much operate on a “fire and forget” basis. I have always believed that the most important asset a business enjoys is the customers it has, not the ones it hopes to land. Sure, growth is nice, but return business from people who feel they are getting more than their money’s worth is the key to longevity, no matter what business you’re in. It was this unique type of practitioner/client relationship that resulted in a lot of the people who received Safe Harbour Security’s letter of lies treating it as the scam it was and relegating it to the garbage.

The troubling thing about all this is that a lot of the security businesses that formerly did business with BBC, and those that, unlike me, retained Safe Harbour Security directly, are still selling alarm monitoring services to their own clients and sending them to Safe Harbour Security in the sincere belief that the service is what the company website says it is: “Security for your peace of mind.” After all, what sounds more comforting and snuggly than a “safe harbour”?

But none of those other security company owners has my background in emergency communications so I’m sure they sleep soundly at night in blissful ignorance of the razor edge their business survival is balanced on. My own experience with Safe Harbour Security and its way of doing business has turned up absolutely nothing of value in any aspect I was exposed to. My personal advice to investors and my colleagues in the security industry is to avoid them like the plague, and I would also advise anyone looking to buy a monitored alarm system of any kind to make any involvement by your security contractor with Safe Harbour Security an absolute deal breaker.

Safe Harbour Security is a large and diverse company with fingers in a lot of pies. Most large companies are creatures of money gathered from investors looking to cash in on a thriving market. There is certainly nothing evil or wrong about that except for one not inconsequential problem that the recent heavily publicized reversal in the fortunes of automobile companies has served to highlight. Being a director or CEO of a company doesn’t mean you have any idea what you’re doing, and being wealthy doesn’t mean you’re smart or even particularly intelligent  As often as not, wealth can come from fortunes of birth or death, marrying money, being well connected, or any combination of those together. This explains how George W. Bush got his last job.

In conclusion, and as shocking as it might sound, I have only hit the high spots in describing the seemingly bottomless pit of incompetence that was my experience with Safe Harbour Security. Yes, there’s more, but I don’t really think that I need to include it here because if I haven’t made my point by now it’s never going to happen, and I like my readers to get through my articles before they notice that their ass has gone to sleep. I can’t say that the company couldn’t be saved if a passionate, knowledgeable, intelligent person were to take the reins, but that’s not my take on the way things are at Safe Harbour Security now. A review of my e-mail correspondence with Safe Harbour Security President Robert Johnson, and CEO Donnie Snow reveals that neither of them can even spell for shit.

Based on my personal observations and experience, as well as my professional opinion, I’m giving Safe Harbour Security a big fat F in all areas of performance. Even though they recently got up on their hind legs, being all vindictive like, and sent out a libelous letter to my clients in a failed, spiteful attempt to put me out of business, my experiences as I’ve related them here convince me that hiring them to actually do my alarm monitoring would have guaranteed that Whynacht Security & Survival wouldn’t be here today.