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.)

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.)

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.

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.)

When I built the workshop at the bottom of the garden (OK, it’s a shed), I’m glad to say I went a bit over-the-top insulating it. I was going to line the walls with pegboard so I put polystyrene foam and aluminium foil behind the pegboard. By the way, holes are darned expensive: pegboard is more than three times the price of plain hardboard. I couldn’t see any way of doing the same kind of thing for the roof, so I gritted my teeth and stumped up the money for the proper thing—foil-coated polyfoam.

The trouble is I should never have let the cat watch Pinocchio. When I’m working down there, he fancies coming in and helping. Once he’s in, however, and sees the reality of filing things, he quickly gets bored and wants to go out. Then, only having a slightly better memory than a goldfish, he wants to come in again. And so it goes; along with my nice warm air.

I thought I’d heard of most scams. But here’s one from the FSB (Federation of Small Businesses) scamwatch pages that I hadn’t heard of.

You get into your car in a car park and start it up. You reverse out of your space and see a note stuck to the rear window. You get out to retrieve the notice, the scumbags then jump into your car—engine running and unlocked—and off they go.

So if you’ve just got into your car and are moving off, don’t be persuaded to stop and investigate any little peculiarities. Wait until you’re a good distance away before you investigate. If you must stop just after you’ve moved off, be very careful. Have a good look around from the inside with the doors locked first. If you must get out, try to wait until a family is in the vicinity and then switch off the engine, take your keys and take your purse.

I had already heard of another much scarier scam. You start to reverse, there’s a scream, you stop and leap out only to find someone under the rear of your car. But you didn’t hit them. They were hiding; they screamed first and then slid into place after you stopped.

We have just decided that we are no longer accepting jobs from a certain area of Putney in south-west London. There are so many barriers and “no entry”s, that unless you have a specialist map you cannot get to a significant proportion of the residents. And, of course, your customer is necessarily always going to be included in that percentage. And of course that map isn’t available to tradespeople.

I have a brother-in-law who is a topologist—I really do—and he agrees that there are certain streets that you cannot reach, and one street where if you do manage to get to it, you can never leave again. (Topology is the branch of mathematics which says a teacup is the same as a doughnut, which can prove the hairy ball theorem—that you can’t comb down the hairs of a hairy ball without creating a cowlick—and which probably started with the proof, long ago, that there was no promenade that would take a walker over each and every one of the seven bridges of Königsberg just once.)

I’m getting a call a day from the same bunch of cold callers. They are the Locksmith Register. They were pests when they were on their own. Now they’re part of BT Customerstreet, which is part of BT Directories. BT Directories bought a whole bunch of pests via their acquisition of web “services” companies such as Ufindus and the original Customerstreet.

If you’re a tradesperson in the UK you may well have received a nuisance call from the same bunch. I’m sure they pester plumbers, decorators, etc. just as badly. They open with “I’m calling from BT and I’m looking for a locksmith/plumber/whatever.” Of course they’re not. They’re looking to sell you website building or “optimization”. And if you take only a short look at the results of a google search on BT Customerstreet, you’ll struggle to find any happy customers; the only positive stuff you will find is BT Customerstreet’s own copious blogs which seem to be trying to crowd the complaint blogs and sites off the front few pages of google searches.

The other very annoying thing is their ignoring of the Telephone Preference Service or TPS. If you haven’t signed up with TPS, you might consider it. It does actually reduce the number of nuisance calls and cold calls that you get. A surprising number–the majority in fact–of telephone marketing and sales companies respect the TPS. But not BT Customerstreet.

Being BT they claim, with near certainty of being half right, that you are already a customer and therefore not covered by the TPS.

Anyway the good news is that the Office of Fair Trading have received several complaints. MPs have received complaints. Trades organisations have received complaints. So maybe something will happen to curb this unpleasant bunch.