LEWISVILLE, N.C. — Thomas and Elisa Milam of Lewisville laugh about it now, but in the early hours of Christmas Eve, the couple thought a burglar was in their home.
"We were sitting up in our bed, watching a movie, it was 12:30," the husband shares. "And we heard noises down here."
Milam quietly went for his gun and instructed Elisa to check on their daughter and hide in the upstairs bathroom.
"We waited to see if we heard more noises and we did, and so at that time, I was like 'Okay, call the police'" he explains.
When Forsyth County deputies arrived, they found the culprit.
"They did a sweep through our house and then they come up and they find out what the intruder is," he says.
Their brand new Eufy robot vacuum they got for Christmas.
"They said, 'How long have you had it?' and I said, 'About two days,'" he says. "They all just start laughing."
The officers told them it happens more often than people realize.
And let's face it, it takes a while to get used to new gadgets.
Greensboro tech expert A'ron McCullough suggests these tips for new electronics users:
- Read the instructions included with your product before using it. You can also use Google to find more straight-forward manuals.
- Always buy a case for portable electronics since they're more likely to break.
- Always connect your devices to secure WiFi networks.
- Don't share or repeat passwords across different sites and devices.
- Make sure you're buying your electronics from reliable stores or sites.
For the Milams, all it took was playing with the settings to find the cause of the late-night burglary-turned-clean-up sesh.
"My daughter had been playing with the remote the day-of," Thomas says. "There's a place on the bottom of the screen of the remote that has the scheduled time, and I didn't know that."
The Milams are just grateful this was a false alarm and are grateful deputies responded as quickly as they did.
"Having heard what we heard, we still would've called the police," Milam says. "Looking back on it we still believe we did the right thing."