Persistent calls from TELUS Monitoring wake Matthew, alerting him to a house fire
Real Life Stories · Aug 3, 2021
"I was attending a sales call on a Friday morning for 9 am, located near our family cottage, a 3 hour drive from my home, so instead of getting up at 5 am, I decided to stay the Thursday night at the family cottage. I worked in the office until 9 pm, then made the 3 hour drive to the cottage, working through lunch and dinner. This cottage country is a ghost town in the winter, especially on a Thursday at midnight, and take out food was limited to a gas station or mom and dad's freezer.
I put a frozen pizza in the oven, turned the tv on, and proceeded to fall asleep. Well the pizza at some point caught fire in the oven, I woke up at 5:00 am (ironic timing), with my phone ringing relentlessly, I slept through the monitoring center call, app alerts, my parents first 2 calls, and a 105 decibel siren! It was the 3rd call from my parents asking what the heck I was doing that woke me up, to find the cottage full of dense smoke. It is a bungalow and the alarms photoelectric smoke was way down at opposite end in the sleeping area and I was on the couch. Well, I opened up the doors and windows, as I waited for the fire department to deal with the fire in the built-in oven.
I was all good and I made the 9 am sales call (and got the sale), we got a desperately needed new oven, I got a bill for removing the smoke smell out of the cottage, and gained an anecdote that has helped me sell thousands of smoke communicators because if it wasn't for the smoke system, monitored alarm response, and resulting phone calls, I would not made it thru the night to hear my 8:15 am alarm go off on my phone probably would not have woke up at all."
- Matthew, from Brantford, ON
