Doorbell 9000

February 23, 2026

Greetings from Door Number One,

I’m sure there are some of you who will judge me, but I will confess anyway: I don’t have a doorbell camera.  If you are a potential burglar, please disregard this essay.

Recently someone knocked at our front door.  I could tell without looking that it wasn’t anyone I knew because, except for Halloween, it is a rare moment that anyone uses the front door. 

If I want to know who is at my front door, I have a few choices.  I could call my neighbor and   ask her, since she has a doorbell camera.  I could belly crawl into the dining room and peek over the windowsill, which faces the porch.  Or I could open the door very carefully, using a method perfected before burglars.

Which leads me to this other reality.  If you wanted me to know you were at the front door, you would have several choices. 1. Yell ‘Trick or Treat’.  2. Look in the dining room window and wave at me. 3. Knock really loud.

Strangely, whenever someone knocks at the door, our response is always the same: “What was that noise?”  Which leads to all manner of investigations, including the water heater, the sump pump and to add variety, the dryer.  Ironically, the whole time I am trying to solve the puzzle, I am thinking, “What could it be?  It sounds almost like someone is knocking at the door.”

To be fair to the residents here, woodpeckers are regularly tapping on the cedar trim, so quite often we’ll ignore knocking noises entirely.  Here I would like to apologize to my shrinking list of friends who may have dropped by.

When we bought this house, back before Y2K, there was a very modern feature that was a selling point.  The house was wired with an intercom, which allowed the homeowner to speak to any room in the house using cutting edge technology from the previous century. I believe there was a ‘Morse code’ setting on the system.

My kids used the intercom for a while, first to annoy us, and then ignore us.  Over the years, as we painted different rooms, we removed the intercom devices for esthetic reasons.  (It looked like we were operating a Taco Bell drive through in our bedrooms)

But among these units was a box near the front door that featured a doorbell and a button that allowed the visitor to talk to whomever was inside the house.  When I removed that box, it was with the promise that I would one day replace it with a new doorbell Someday.  (‘Someday’ is capitalized since it is referred to in the book of Revelations)

Since then, visitors can enjoy a very esthetically pleasing space at the front door where the doorbell used to be.

There is a button at our back door that we all thought was associated with the garage door opener until some child pushed it and we heard a sort of clunking chime sound, which sent us to investigate the hot water heater.  In fact, it was our doorbell, which even as I write this, I have no idea if it worked again.

And so, that’s the history of our doorbell (which no doubt will be made into a Netflix series) and that brings us back to having a camera to greet visitors.  I have to admit I am torn.  I know we need something at the front door for those rare moments when strangers accidentally arrive there, but I have concerns.  There’s the privacy issue, (not mine, yours) and wondering about surveillance creep and my social responsibility, not to mention the risk of some Ai thing hacking into my life and ringing my doorbell or changing the settings on my thermostat. But mostly I am too cheap to buy a doorbell camera.

I’m not saying I don’t envy people who have cameras in their doorbell, I do.  I realize they add a level of safety, convenience, and of course status. (It’s so embarrassing when the Jehovah’s Witnesses have to yell “Are you going to Hell?” from the front yard.)

Then I realized the solution.  Recently we were out of town, and my wife got a message from her birdfeeder.  (I really never expected to write those words.)  The birdfeeder has a camera on it which shares cute pictures and videos of whatever birds show up to diminish my net worth. (I am claiming the chickadees as dependents on my tax return) Here is the answer to my problem.

All we have to do is train the birds to nudge the birdfeeder in the direction of the front door and we can see if anyone is there.  I know, it seems like a stretch, but I’ll go to great lengths to be digitally responsible.  And save a few bucks.

So if you come by to visit anytime soon, I would urge you to stop and introduce yourself to the cardinals enjoying their buffet.  They will eventually get the message to us.  Or if you’re in a hurry, (for example you are certain the End Times are imminent) you can go ask my neighbor’s camera if she’s going to Hell and she’ll let me know you’re here to see me.

Hope this finds you peeping,

David

Copyright © 2026 David Smith