Locksmithing and Security

“Do you, uh, pick locks?” “Yes.”

“You don’t damage them or nothing?” “That’s right.”

“Could you come and let me into my flat on XXXington Road?” “Almost certainly. What number flat is it?”

” [long silence]  It’s the one at the back.” “I see. Will you have ID on you?”

“Well, I can find a letter.” “Right. Are you there now?”

“Well, no. But I’m only a couple of miles away. You could give me a call and I’ll nip around.”

“Oh, dear. How unlucky is that? I’ve just dropped my van keys down a drain. I won’t be able to attend after all.”

In the past, I’ve phoned the police and asked if they’d like to attend very suspicious jobs with me. Sadly they don’t take up the offer. Even more sadly, Chris will find a locksmith who will let him in.

(Chris the Crafty Cockney was a character in The Fast Show (UK TV, 1994 to 1997) who was completely up front about knicking anything.)

It’s time to mention locks as fire hazards again.

When considering the locks on your doors, you need to strike a balance between security and safety. You want to keep thieves and other scum out, but you don’t want to keep yourself in should a fire break out. (There must be other internal hazards you might be in a hurry to escape from, but fire is the main one.)

If you deadlock your front door whilst you’re in, you run the risk of not having your key on you when you reach the front door with flames behind you. (Deadlocking means “you locked it, you unlock it”; it’s the opposite of a sprung or “live” lock.)

It’s obviously not a good idea to keep the key in the lock, even if there’s no letter-slot. “Yes but I always leave the key on the hall table.” Again that’s a security risk if you have a letter-slot; and Sod’s Law says that it won’t be there the day of an emergency — someone couldn’t be bothered to find their key when they left that morning so they took the spare.

If you must deadlock your front door when you’re inside, get a break-glass box with a spare key inside, near the front door (but not reachable via the letter-slot).

The best option is the simplest: traditional bolts. Don’t get titchy little ones, with titchy little screws. Get some thumping big ones with decent sized screws, especially the screws in the staple (the part that holds the bolt when it’s been thrown).

Parents are funny beasts. Far more children are harmed by family members — usually mum or dad — than by strangers. Yet parents are obsessed by the threat of harm from strangers. One mother at our junior school ran a campaign to stop photographs being taken at sports day in case a picture of her child ended up on the internet inflaming some perverted stranger to start stalking the poor girl (by “poor girl” I mean with regard to the mother she’s saddled with).

Furthermore, this irrational fear, ceaslessly stoked up by our wonderful press, is causing fewer and fewer children to walk to school, contributing greatly to the 1 in 3 risk (stranger harm is more like a 1 in 1,000,000 risk) of chronic ill health (and it’s contributing greatly to the number of women floundering around in their bloody chelsea tractors).

(It does seem to be a predominantly female lunacy, this desire to drive around in vehicle that’s far too big for their road and their driving skill. The male lunacy tends more towards driving around in a vehicle that’s too small and too powerful for their limited driving skill.)

I spent 20 minutes yesterday trying to figure out why on earth a sliding patio door wouldn’t lock in the closed position yet operated perfectly well in the open position. Well of course, we go through this half-a-dozen times a week at spring time and winter time: the door heats up or cools down and the bolts, etc. no longer want to enter their keeps.

However, I’d tried every keep and they were all in the perfect position. So I tried it one more time and this time I stood outside. The handle had been fitted 90 degrees out and was fouling the frame. Doh!

None. Not only have they frequently been criticised for more hidden charges to spring upon you than anyone else; not only did they consider charging you to use the toilets on the aircraft; but they’ve just been fined for failing to feed passengers stranded by the ash clould. Airlines have a duty of care to their passengers and this includes not letting them starve.

As I may have mentioned, we got stranded by the ash cloud but our airline (Monarch), like just about all the other airlines except Ryanair, looked after us really well.

I’ve just got back from a job at a new block of apartments in Wandsworth. Every rimlock was fitted upside-down. Some builder who hadn’t got much of a idea as to how doors and locks work – surprise, surprise – and worse than that, whose supervision must have been non-existent – had worsened things with a decision to fit all these locks production line style. Drill all the cylinder holes, screw all the back plates on, fit all the keeps, etc. Nasty shock time would have been when the time came to put the first cylinder in and he (or she) discovered that they should have used the template that comes with the lock as none of the locks were lined up with their cylinder holes, and the only way out was to fit every cylinder upside-down.

Things are still pretty hectic, catching up after the unintentionally extended holidays. I swear a holiday can take six weeks off your life. I’m well past the age where I can pack the night before a trip, so lose a week before the holiday for packing, buying extra cat food, writing instructions for cat sitters on how to operate the clockwork feeding machine, cancelling the milk, etc. Then there’s the two weeks actually away, which turning into three this time around.

Then there’s a few weeks catching up with the housekeeping as it’s all I can do normally, as a single parent with two kids in an too-large house to keep up with disinfecting, shopping, washing, etc. Notice the absence of cleaning from the list. I have a scheme. Every three months I call an industrial cleaning company and claim that tenants have just moved out, which is cheaper and way more convenient than having a cleaner come in every few days. (My job, of course, takes me to plenty of places where tenants really have just moved out, and trust me, we’re actually way cleaner than most.) And, by the way, if you haven’t read the book or seen the film about Simon Carr’s odd take on life as a single parent (The Boys Are Back), I recommend them.

Well that was quite a month. We went on an Easter holiday to the Nile. And got stuck because of the ash cloud. We got back a few days ago after a holiday that got extended to three weeks. The tour operator and the local agent were fantastic. We were treated to a free week’s luxury accommodation and breakfast – so pretty much a week’s holiday in Egypt for the price of lunch and dinner! If anyone’s contemplating a holiday in Egypt, I’ll put up who they are.

Then there’s been a week of frantic catching up. The cat won’t let us out of its sight at the moment.

And frantic catching up isn’t helped by nuisance calls, which mostly still seem to be from BT’s CustomerStreet. I wish the OFT would hurry up and do whatever it is they are going to do about these pests.

When you ring a tradesperson from the office, you might consider whether of not your call will show up as “Number Withheld”. A sole trader who’s at the end of their tether over nuisance calls might be tempted to let “Number Withheld”s go to voicemail.

Over the next few years, and thanks mostly to the internet (not criticising; I think the internet is one of the modern wonders), locks will be becoming unpickable. So even your best, friendly, local locksmith won’t be able to get you in non-destructively should you lock yourself out. So you’ll need to leave keys with a trusted friend who’s nearby but not next door.

Imagine you’ve broken into a house and you’re one of the top 10% of thieves, intelligence-wise, i.e. you’re IQ has just struggled over 50. You find a set of keys. It doesn’t matter if, sensibly, there’s no label. You’re going to try …

So, don’t leave keys with next door neighbours. Leave them with someone close but not that close.

(Anyone remember a film portraying Buster Edwards as a, mostly, lovable thief? I hated that film. Thieves blight lives. End of story.)

Back in the 1800s the slanging matches between the various lock manufacturers were pretty vitriolic affairs. One of the great stirrers of his day was a certain Alfred Hobbs. I’ll tell that story another day. (I’ve said that before I think; must get around to it. Wikipedia’s entry doesn’t look correct!)

Anyway, locksmithing is once again having a vitriolic spat. A new lock came on the market a little while ago; from Cisa, a well-respected lock and security company. I think their stuff is very good. Their electric release locks, for example, seem to go on forever. I’ve been wanting one for an experiment for years now, and every one I see on a problematic customer’s door is working fine and I can’t have it; the problem is always something else.

Another lock manufacturer, whose name isn’t far off the savoury pear whose name begins “Avoc…”, decided to rubbish this new cylinder as part of the marketing of their own new cylinder.

This undignified and unethical scheme has backfired on the unsavoury lock manufacturer in a rather spectacular way however. A couple of irked hobbyists have shown how two of the principal, purported selling points of the unsavoury manufacturer’s lock are miles off working satisfactorily.