ADT: Sign Up Or Thieves Will Kill Your Dogs With Oven Cleaner
Leo thought that letting his two dogs greet an approaching ADT salesman would be enough of a hint that he didn't want their security services. Nope! The well-trained salesman sensitively barked: "You know what they are doing to dogs now, don't you? They're spraying oven-cleaner into their face, killing them in 20 seconds!"
Leo writes:
I just got a visit from a friendly neighborhood ADT salesman who freaked the hell out of me.My dogs went nuts when they saw him approaching the house, but I didn't get to the door fast enough to drawn the shade and hide in my closet, so when he rang the bell I was forced to open it. I saw his big ADT yard sign and T-shirt, so I knew what was coming. I opened the door to tell him buzz off when my Jack Russell blew through the front door and into my yard, barking at him incessantly as my bigger dog barked from the door. I smiled and retrieved my dog, saying 'Well I guess I don't need you since I have them." I offered a meak smile for politeness sake and headed back inside.
"You know what they are doing to dogs now, don't you?" He yelled back at me. I figured some side-show horror story was coming and didn't want to hear it, so I said 'Not interested buddy' and kept walking. "They're spraying oven-cleaner into their face, killing them in 20 seconds!" he screamed back. What the @#$%!
This guy was soooo ready for me to use my dog excuse to get out of talking to him, and freaked me with something I have never heard of and now will never forget. He was obviously trained to respond this way because he didn't stop talking even though I said I wasn't interested. Sweet holy crap what kind of company allows its people to say such horrible things to potential customers. I know times are tough and everybody is just trying to survive but come on...they're gonna spray my dogs in the face with oven cleaner?
I told him I didn't want to hear anymore and shut the door in his freaky face. Consumerist, two questions. (A) Have YOU ever heard of breakins by theives bearing Pam, and (B) am I the only one really disturbed by what this guy said? I mean he said it so non-chalantly is was clearly rehearsed. I'm a corporate trainer and I spend my days teaching people who not to sound like that.
I don't own any oven cleaner because cleaning sucks, and after today, that's the way its staying...
Um, well, no, now that you ask, this is the first we've heard of Pam-wielding thieves. Does Pam even clean ovens? We use it on cookware, not dogs, but it's that sort of inside-the-box thinking that keeps us from being thieves.
The pushy retort is less surprising. Salesmen often pack snappy answers to common objections, and sometimes, like with ADT's salesman, they go way over the line.
(Photo: OakleyOriginals)
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Comments:
'Pam' isn't over cleaner and will just coat the dog with buttery goodness (or garlic flavor). Over cleaner however, is highly caustic and will at minimum permanently damage the dogs eyes.
P.S. ADT are a bunch of cocks anyway. We had their service for a while and it was a complete waste of time. They never responded to any alarms.
Strange. I mean, we've all heard of dogs saving victims from thieves' wily ways, but I never realized villains had taken the sport to such excessively preemptive ends. For your consideration, though:
You just don't get it do you? They're not talking about theives! They're talking about Oven Cleaners!! They're 10 times worst because they seem to be the best people in the world... what with their charity to clean my oven. But then thats where they get you. Its a false sense of security, like with those foul Chimney Sweepers! My god man... haven't you been keeping up with the news!!
Seriously though. Kitchen cleaner probably isn't safe for your dogs, but if a thief is trying to get on Dumb Crooks, carrying Pam with them is the fast track to it.
Too bad you didn't have time to test the oven-cleaner theory on the ADT guy.
yeah, pam isn't oven cleaner it is spray grease in a can. The worst that it will do is grease up your dog and create a brown buildup over time!
You know, that oven cleaner thing sounds like a great way to deal with trespassing ADT sales people...
Oops. Was that my outside voice? Sorry.
@zentex: spray chocolate covered raisin dust in my face and I will love it.
do it to my dog, I will punch you.
All you need is a bigger can of oven cleaner to defend yourself with. You could have cleaner shoot outs in the living room. Would be dramatic much like the OK Corral.
Beyond that, thats pretty stupid.
It's not good to confuse your readers into thinking aerosolized vegetable oil and oven cleaner are one in the same.
If someone sprays Pam into their oven, no big deal... just a dirtier oven. But if someone coats their frying pan with Oven Off... yikes!
@SpruceStreetPhil: that would be a lot of chocolate. it takes more than a quick spray of chocolate dust to hurt a dog and a lot lot longer than '20 seconds' - some facts on chocolate poisoning in dogs here - [www.ehow.com]
I'm a miniature wargamer. One of the things I use to cut down on costs is pick up used, poorly painted pieces on ebay, usually quite cheaply. I toss it in a shot glass, blast it with oven cleaner, and then just 2 hours later, all the paint slides right off when you rinse it.
That's for the pewter pieces. I could not do with the plastic ones. The oven cleaner completely melts them in a few hours. For those, you use Simple Green cleaner.
Just a little piece of mostly unrelated oven cleaner trivia.
@KhaiJB: oh i know haha, my point was that some things that kill dogs are harmless to humans so lets not make the assumption that oven cleaner will kill us too, although it probably isn't too good for us to be inhaling
@I_have_something_to_say: Yeah I don't know why the article, which started out about oven cleaner, quickly became about non-stick Pam, which is good sprayed on popcorn as a low-cal treat, or sprayed in pans to keep them from sticking to the food.
Oven cleaner is clearly another animal completely.
@I_have_something_to_say: Totally agree.
The cheap oven cleaner I get at the dollar store makes me want a respirator whenever I use it. Can't be good for a dog.
I surprised the guy didn't say they would spray FaBreeze at the dogs, b/c of the old rumor it killed pets. If this guy came to my door, I'm throwing a cat or him. Or a really pissed off whistlepig, as virtually nothing can kill them.
@Radi0logy: I know Pam is for the non-stick function, but not as a flavoring for popcorn. I'll give it a spray the next I nuke a bag. Thanks.
As much as I don't agree with the ADT salesman's tactic (and meanness...seriously, someone needs to get their anger under control), who ever said you HAD to open your door. No one forces anyone to open their door. Next time don't open the door.
On the upside, you are probably never going to see him gracing your doorstep again.
When I was driving a big truck over the road we carried a can of wasp killer. Its pretty dead on ( pun intended )at 20 feet and we were told it would really mess some one up. The only thing we used it on was a wasp nest or 2 but man it was accurate.
Spraying an adt-hole who forces his way into your home with a .38 special for 20 seconds works better.
The ADT guy is an idiot. 99% of homeowners will view the dogs as being more important than the possessions, but ADT can do nothing to protect them. If you are one of the 1% who view dogs as an expendable line of defense, you are too hardcore for ADT anyway.
@I_have_something_to_say: I imagine by the time the movements of the dogs were programmed out....an elephant could storming through the house and not set off the alarm. well that would happen with our 3 cats and a dog.
@thelushie: I tried to ignore the door when this environmentalist came by the other day and she sat and knocked vigorously for over ten minutes.
I like to use this line whenever security-related salesmen try to scare me into buying:
Salesman: But surely you can't put a price on your family's lives.
Homer: I wouldn't have thought so either, but here we are.
@ajlei: I would let them knock, and if it was too long, I would call the police (non emergency number).
I've always wondered whether I was actually paying for anything with ADT. My father had them for a while and also said they ignored alarms. Considering that the alarm part is free after the install and works with or without monitoring, the $30/month is solely for the monitoring, which may or may not be useless. My kids have pressed the panic buttons a few times and no one ever called; I just assumed/hoped that we caught it in time.
Not true. Oven cleaner is safe to use for obvious reasons. I guess if you spray a whole can directly into the mouth of a person or animal it could kill him but too much water will kill you, too.
Oven cleaner is pretty nasty, yes, but very few things aside from substances specifically designed as poisons will kill mammals in 20 seconds, and there are even fewer which kill on contact (rather than ingestion). And anything that nasty is, honestly, a bigger threat to the wielder than his intended victims (if you had a spray-can full of toxins which could kill a dog-sized mammal in 20 seconds, would you spray them indiscriminately around a place you intend to spend some time robbing?).
I can believe a shot of oven cleaner in the face would permanently blind a dog in 20 seconds, but that's a different story. Bear spray seems a better way to get a dog out of your way, should you simply want to incapacitate them.
Also, re dogs and thieves' willingness to tangle therewith: low-hanging fruit is the issue. Thieves can find plenty of houses without dogs, should they actually have burglarious plans. There's no percentage for them in making things more complicated.
I doubt any thief could get close enough to my Rottweiler to spray her with anything (other than, science forbid, bullets).
@morlo: Agreed. There is nothing more valuable a thief could take from me than my dog (except maybe my dog coated in solid gold!!)
@ICherub:
You should reprogram the system to call ADT's sales line and play your voice saying "yes, could you come to my home to provide me with an estimate?"
I bet they'll respond to alarms quite quickly that way.
ADT came by our house at 9 PM and my wife actually listened to the whole sales pitch before closing the door. I told her next time just slam the door in their face and they will get the message that you don't want their services.
There was a big black widow in our garage after coming back from vacation this year and wasp spray did the trick...the spider shriveled right up in like 2 seconds flat.
Does anyone else find it eerie how they quote the Jamaican?
" if yu look outside all 3 o'clock inna di morning, yu see some strange face man a walk past"
@ajlei:
It would have been fun to sneak out a back window, slowly creep around the house, stealthily open the car door, start the engine, close the door, rev the engine, slam the sucker into drive, spin the tires, and bolt out of the driveway leaving the environmentalist in a cloud of burned rubber.
Mmm...buttery, garlicky dog....droool.
Sorry, anyway, what I was going to say was I sat down with one of their salesmen once, and asked them to give me a rundown of what happens when an alarm is triggered in my house. At each step of what happens, I asked him specifics to determine an exact time frame for each phase of the "help, my family is being raped to death" response. Of course, he couched his answers in "As little as..." language, which was fine. Because I determined that, if everything went as smoothly and as quickly as possible, and the cop that lived four houses down was the one to respond to ADT's distress call... it would take 15 MINUTES from when the alarm was triggered, to when the men with cuffs and guns show up. That's 15 minutes best-case scenario. I'm sorry, but even without a criminal bone in my body, I could loot a house of the valuable stuff pretty quickly in less than 15 minutes. And as for safety, how long did it take those seven men to kill and rob the couple down in Florida with all the handicapped kids? No thanks, ADT, I think I'll pass.
But could we coat more things in Pam? I like that suggestion!
@DaveDidNotPay: In grade school, my music teacher explained that they have some dialect of English that is often written out that way. We learned a song out of the book with words like Saturday written out 'Satiday'. She told us what it was called but I can't possibly recall at this point. This is only the second instance I can remember seeing it written out, though.
If that a..hole had said that to me I would have immediately ordered him to get off of my property. If he didn't comply I would have called the police and told them someone was trespassing.
@thelushie: "Hi, is this my sherrif's local passive-aggressive line? I'm in my house and I need a representative from the I-don't-want-to-answer-my-door-and-say-no-so-can-you-send-an-officer-right-away department?"
Really?
They do go away once you open the door and say "no thanks." Barking dogs help as well - I use mine all the time. I'd never waste local resources like that unless it was the same salesman coming back multiple times in one day in some stalkerish fashion. I can actually take care of myself and figure that law enforcement should actually take care of stuff I can't actually handle by being an actual human.
Homeowner: Do you have any oven cleaner on you right now?
ADT guy: No, why?
Homeowner: Release the hounds...
@KhaiJB: Oven cleaner is some common form of acid, I can't remember what one at the moment. It wouldn't kill your dog in 20 seconds. It would more likely blind them, cause skin, nose and mouth burns, possibly burns into the respiratory system. So probably more of a massive maiming or slow miserable death.
Maybe people need to start chasing ADT salesmen away from their doorstep with a can of oven cleaner.
@I_have_something_to_say: We recently signed with Brinks Home Security. When we were talking with the guy who did the installation, we mentioned that we'd researched other services, including ADT. He started to say ADT was lousy but stopped himself, realizing that that might not look professional. Try as we might (and we did), we couldn't get him to do any more trash-talking on ADT. But considering that we named several services, his reaction to ADT spoke volumes.
@thelushie: It is the same social conditioning that makes people feel that they must answer the phone just because it is ringing.
Between being bombarded with door to door salesmen and telemarketers on our new phone line last spring I forced myself to get beyond that guilt of not answering.
@Bogart's Falcon aka Philly Falcon: Wield a baseball bat while shouting in Klingon. That is my plan of last resort if a door to door salesmen refuses to leave. I have had a few start shouting obscenities at me for closing the door on them. Most leave after they figure out I am not going to open the door again.
The main ingredient for Easy Off oven cleaner is diethylene glycol. (I'm assuming most oven cleaners have roughly the same active ingredients.) Wikipedia says that "diethylene glycol has low acute toxicity in animal experiments." Translation: it can't kill a dog in twenty seconds.
Seriously, if there was something that could kill a dog -- even a small dog -- in twenty seconds by spraying it in the face DO YOU THINK YOU WOULD BE ABLE TO BUY IT IN A STORE? No government agency would allow it to be marketed. No company would manufacture something that highly toxic for consumer use. The product liability would be prohibitive.
It just wouldn't happen. EVER.
I read the Material Data Safety Sheet for Easy Off. It suggests that in case of exposure, the eyes should be flushed with water and if irritation persists, then medical/veterinary attention should be sought.
Only a total moron would try to stop a rottweiler with a can of oven cleaner.
This ADT guy is full of crap and unfortunately he got some on the poor OP. He's an asshat.
@Ouze: Holy crap, I never thought of that. I've used brake fluid to strip minis before, but that still left paint in the crevices, and I'd have to soak them overnight. Now I'll have to pick up some oven cleaner the next time I need to strip one.
if it kills a dog sprayed in the face in 20seconds, it would kill a human in the same time.
methinks the saleman is full of shit.