Halloween landed on a Tuesday this year, which meant a school-night crowd of trick-or-treaters and a dad (several dads, actually, walking in a loose herd behind their kids) checking their watches around 8pm like the whole thing had a hard stop. Ours kind of did — the doorbell traffic basically died by 8:15 and I turned the porch light off at 8:30 like the mildly petty adult I am.
I put a video doorbell in back in the spring, mostly because Amazon packages kept walking off the porch, and tonight was the first real stress test it's had. From about 6:15 to 7:45 the thing did not stop. Every ring, every group that just walked up and stood there deciding whether to ring or not, every kid who leaned on the button because buttons are fun when you're seven, it's all a push notification. My phone buzzed something like ninety times in ninety minutes. I ended up just leaving the bowl out on the step around 7:50 and watching the app instead of answering the door, which felt like a strange late-stage-2023 way to hand out candy, sitting on my couch monitoring a candy bowl through a camera instead of just, you know, handing out candy.
Small complaint, and I'll keep it small: I pay $3 a month for the extended clip history on this thing, and it bugs me every single time the charge hits. It's a doorbell. The core function (someone approaches, camera records, I get a notification) should not be behind a subscription, and yet here we are, and I paid it again this month like everyone else because losing 60 days of clips felt worse than losing $3. This is exactly the kind of thing that annoyed me about smart home stuff in general back when I first started buying it, and somehow four years later I've made peace with paying rent on my own front porch.
Anyway, the actual content was good. Ran out of the first bowl of candy around 7:40 (I'd budgeted badly, bought two bags of the fun-size Twix and one bag of the chewy Sweetarts and apparently underestimated how popular Twix is with a nine-year-old crowd) and had to do an emergency run to the gas station two blocks over. They had a shelf of leftover seasonal stuff and I came back with a fistful of Airheads and a bag of something called "Skitterz" that is absolutely not Skittles and should not be marketed within thirty feet of the word. Nobody complained. Kids at 7:50pm on Halloween are not discerning.
The doorbell did catch one genuinely great clip: a group of four, one dressed as what I'm fairly sure was supposed to be a Minion, did a full synchronized bow after getting candy, like they'd rehearsed it walking over. Saved that one. Everything else is going to get overwritten by next week because, again, I'm not paying for the tier that keeps clips longer than 60 days, and frankly 60 days is already more Halloween doorbell footage than any reasonable person needs.
Two houses down, the Hendersons handed out full-size Reese's cups and I felt real, physical jealousy watching a stream of kids detour specifically to their driveway. That's the neighborhood main character energy every year and I respect it even as it makes my fun-size Twix look cheap by comparison. Next year I'm either matching them or going full cheapskate and doing the thing where you turn your porch light off entirely and pretend not to be home, no in-between.
I didn't do much else tech-wise today. Meta's new headset came out earlier this month and a coworker brought his into the office to show it off — I tried it for about four minutes, it's noticeably better than the last one, and then I gave it back and went to lunch, which is roughly the correct amount of enthusiasm I have left for VR at this point in my life. Some other year I'll have opinions about it. Tonight I've got half a bowl of candy nobody's coming back for and a doorbell app full of notifications I'm never going to look at again.