Soon after I leased my first office space in a local industrial compound the in-house cleaning staff had an accident. One of the janitors which attended to that floor slipped on a wet tile and bumped my door clean off of its rusty hinges.
As soon as I contacted my landlord he advised me that it would require 2 weeks to fix the door. Given that my office at that time was pretty much open to anyone I decided to invest in a motion alert alarm to keep intruders away.
I purchased a small passive infrared alarm that was designed to watch entryways and mounted it facing the hole where my door used to be. My plan was to use it to alert the after-hours security guards to any likely trespassers.
The motion-detecting alarm would sound whenever someone walks by it. And it can even be set up to perform a basic two-tone entry chime for when you are at the office and do not want the alarming to go off and contact the guards.
It was battery-powered so that meant I could install it in any convenient place around my office doorway. I would not have worry about getting landlord approval to drill and run wires through the walls.
In the weeks that I had this security alarm I turned on the two-tone chime while I was inside the office so that I would know anytime someone wanted to see me. I then changed it to alarm mode before I left for the day.
During this period the guards actually captured a few people trying to sneak into my office in the after-hours. These were mainly homeless bums off the street that were aiming to steal whatever was not nailed down to sell it off for some quick money.
It seems silly to have to go 2 weeks without a door but I was able to improvise a smart solution using a motion alert alarm. Rather than throwing the thing away I plan on keeping it and making use of it in the future as part of a complete security system.
