BLOG-DAMMIT
Sharing The Joy Of Living
In A
Community Association
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BLOG-DAMMIT Sharing The Joy Of Living
In A
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March 8, 2010 AMMCOR
Re: Fairway
Village, Fullerton
Please pass this on to our Board of Directors (thanks in advance) I just had a phone call from Nick at Nordic Security, informing me that they do not have copies of our vehicle registrations and asking me to make copies and drop them off at the guard house. I found this phone call to be extremely disturbing. We filled out all of the paperwork that the Association sent us at the beginning of this year, attached copies of our vehicle registration to that paperwork and hand delivered it (as instructed) to a representative of Nordic Security, at the clubhouse, on January 9, 2010. That paperwork included a signed form saying that we had received entrance and outside parking decals for all of our vehicles and we expected it to be properly filled out, with the numbers of those decals, when we turned the paperwork over and received the decals in return. After the person took our paperwork, including the piece of paper mentioned above, we were told that none of the decals had arrived. We said at the time that since the Board of Directors and the security company both knew that the decals had not arrived that it would have been better if they had shared that information with the homeowners, if only via the sign at the gate, and rescheduled the distribution date. But we were assured that everything was under control, that our decals would be delivered to us in the mail within a week and not to worry about it. Well, we all know that none of that happened. More than a month later, a man from Nordic Security simply arrived, unannounced, at our door. He had our decals and he wanted to see our cars. As no appointment had been made, one of our cars wasn't here. We asked the man from Nordic Security, twice, to not touch the vehicles that were here - let's just forget for the moment that they're private property - one of them is a classic car, and we prefer to put the decals on all of our vehicles ourselves. It was a reasonable request, politely made. Nonetheless, the man from Nordic Security completely ignored it, walked right over and applied the decals anyway. Then he asked when we expected to get our 1960 MG running. We told him that it does, in fact, run quite well. Apparently, he didn't believe us, because when he had our son alone for a moment he asked him when we were going to "get that MG running". Not realizing that we had just been asked the same question, our son told him that the MG ran just fine - which, in point of fact, it does. The man from Nordic Security came back on another day, once again unannounced, and applied the decals to the car that wasn't here the first time he came around, spouting some absurd story about having to apply the decals himself to prevent residents from selling them - or some such nonsense. The whole experience was irritating, but, we thought, best forgotten ... just one of those things that sounded like a good idea, turning the decal process over to an outside agency like Nordic, but since it didn't turn out well in practice, would not be repeated. Which brings us to today - two months after we trusted Nordic Security with our personal and private information by taking them at their word that it would be safe to leave it with them until our decals arrived. Replacing the paperwork that Nordic Security lost took about 3 minutes, because we have a printer/copier here at home. Replacing any trust that we may have had in that company - which, after the experience with the rude man who distributed our decals, wasn't much, I admit - probably is never going to happen. A couple of weeks ago, someone who we'd placed on our "preferred guest list" couldn't get past the guard because the guard didn't have a copy of that list. We made a copy of it and dropped it at the guard house, thinking that his not having it was a computer error. It's obvious now that the reason the guard didn't have that list is because it was part of the sheaf of paperwork that we had to turn in on January 9th and that the whole thing has gone missing. Because of Nordic Security's carelessness, someone, somewhere has copies of our vehicle registration, and, we realize now, the rest of our paperwork, too, including our driver's license numbers -- just about everything anyone would need to steal all of our identities. All of this begs the question ... If Nordic didn't have our paperwork ... why did the person they sent around to our house, twice, give us our decals? Our family has lived in this house for 30 years and this is the first time that we've ever had getting our entrance and outside parking decals be made into such a fiasco. We told Nick that, while we would replace the paperwork his company lost, because we want to comply with the rules with regard to having our decals, we expected him to find the original copies, because, until he did, the security of our personal information is at risk. Of course, we know that he's not going to find it. Whoever took it, wherever it ended up, it's long gone and any sense of security that we might have had about that information being kept private went with it. We're sending this letter because the next time we get new decals, we hope that our Board of Directors realizes that the only way to insure the security of the information with which the residents here entrust them is to either handle it themselves, personally, or to have the management company handle it, as we have in years past, under the direct supervision of the Board of Directors. We should never have been asked to leave our paperwork in the hands of an outside contractor without receiving our decals right then and there, on the spot, so that everything could be accounted for in a timely and professional manner. And at no time should any employee of any company we hire to watch our gate be encouraged to believe that holding that position gives he/she/them the right to avail themselves of our private property without our permission, let alone after we have specifically asked them to leave it alone. Apparently, we need our Board of Directors to protect us from our own security company! Cordially, |