Security

We have lived in our house for almost 35 years. But I never understood our address. It was three digits and the letter "B." The house next door was the same three digits and the letter "A." The one across the street was "C." What was the point of the letters? Was the original town council under the impression that they might run out of numbers? About ten years ago, the town decided to redo the house numbers on the streets that had those peculiar addresses. One by one my friends sent me their new house numbers. We waited. Finally a letter came, telling us that on a certain date, four months away, we would have a new house number. We waited with anticipation. And waited. Then, a mere 28 months after that letter, our new house number arrived. Now each home had its own four-digit number. Notifying everyone was as much work as moving--magazines, utilities, friends, family. The woman at our insurance company could not understand how we had a new address if we hadn't moved. One bonus was no longer having to meet our neighbors in the middle of the street after the mail was delivered to sort out who got what, since those old designations confused even the Post Office. Life was good. For about six months, until our daughter called. She had been addressing an envelope to us and her husband noticed that our house number was the same as the code for our garage door opener. Oops. You might wonder why we never noticed. Well, the garage code was never really a number to us. It was a pattern on the keypad. A rather clever one we thought when we came up with it, and hopefully not too simple. On the occasions when I explained the pattern to a friend who needed entry to our house, and they would insist on knowing the numbers, I was mildly annoyed. I'd have to picture a keypad in my mind and recite the actual numbers. So we never noticed. I kept trying to figure out how we'd explain to the police, if our house were ever burglarized, that we weren't stupid enough to use our address as the code. It was an amazing coincidence and we'd just never noticed. Really, Officer!