Locksmithing and Security

If you’re booking a locksmith, or any kind of tradesman, I suggest that you let them know in advance if there is no parking whatsoever where you live.

It’s no good hoping that they’re magicians or athletes with no heavy kit or that they’re going to abseil in from a hovering helicopter. If a tradesman arrives and finds, for example, that it’s residents-only parking for half-a-mile in all directions, and that the contact number is permanently engaged, then if said tradesman is less than a level-eight saint, they might just turn around and head straight for their stress therapist. And the customer will have waited in for naught.

If, on the other hand, a customer says, “We’ll need to find a day where you can come around after four-thirty because that’s when the parking restrictions end”, or “I’ve a visitors parking permit for you”, everyone is heading for a positive and enriching experience.

Hopefully back again after a hiatus for holidays and blog software malfunctions.

What’s been happening? Well I think I reached the point where I need checklists to remind me to read my checklists. I was scheduled to replace a cylinder in a garage door. Now garage doors don’t often have cylinders. Usually they just have a cheap wafer lock built into the handle. But this one was in a better league and had a proper cylinder. (If you’re popping out to check yours, it’s easy enough: where does your key go? Does it go into something that looks like a front door “Yale” with  a circular front at least an inch across? If so — good. Does it go into something that looks like an upside-down pear / exclamation mark? If so — good. If it goes into something circular that’s about half-an-inch across and looks to be part of the handle, well, not quite so good.)

Anyway, this was a cylinder and garage door cylinders are usually what are called half (or single) euro-profile (the pear shape) cylinders. (There’s usually no need to be able to lock them from the inside.)

This does mean, though, that one method for opening, when the key has been lost, is unavailable. So I made a note that just in case I couldn’t pick the lock open, I should ensure that the drill was on board. And as I have a habit of grabbing the drill but forgetting the drill bits, I dutifully made sure I grabbed the drill bits as well.

When I got there I’d remembered everything except the picks! All I had was a small wallet of basic picks, a bit like you see in the movies. I was tempted just to go back and get the full kit, since the basic picks are not all that easy; but I thought I should save some exhaust fumes, be more positive and give it a go. And — glory be — it opened.

Some people haven’t heard of testing.

I’ve just been away on a course and staying in a hotel. I’ve stayed at this hotel before. It’s under new management now. The TV that was in “my” room has gone and in its place is a flat screen mounted on the wall. However, they’ve put the screen six feet above the ground and twenty feet away from the bed; so unless you’ve got an inhumanly flexible neck or have brought binoculars, you can’t watch TV. They’ve spent quite a bit of money on a refit. If you’d spent a lot of money on your newly acquired hotel, wouldn’t you try spending a night in each of the rooms and try doing what guests are likely to be doing (within reason).

And the bath. Now this isn’t the new people’s doing; this bath has been there a while. However, all of it’s sides are vertical. Literally. Ninety degrees to the base. I would suggest that given a shower and a bath, most people would use the shower if they just wanted to get clean. Most people take a bath to have a nice soak and relax. Assuming the people who made the bath didn’t also have inhumanly unusual anatomy, they can’t ever have tested lying in it.

For the first time in at least three years, someone actually asked me what I was doing.

A letting agent had given me a key to an empty property and asked me to change the lock. It’s suprising how often we’re asked to change a lock without being told that there’s also a problem with getting in.

When someone telephones wanting a lock changing, I usually ask whether it’s because the lock has stopped working or because the key has been compromised. Sometimes the reply, perhaps in an are-you-daft tone of voice, is “Well neither. I want you to change the lock because I’m locked out!” It’s kind of nice that we’re seen as some kind of magician but mostly it’s frustrating.

This time I’d forgotten to ask. Knowing the agent, I’d assumed that a change of tenant had necessitated a change of key. However, the key for the top lock wasn’t opening the lock despite the usual repetoire of jiggles and imprecations. I rang the agent and got confirmation that, yes the top lock has been getting trickier and trickier, and yes, there are therefore two reasons we’d like you to change it. So having mentally reviewed that my legal ass was covered, I took up the tools, assumed the posture, and nealy jumped out of my skin when a voice spake unto me, “What are you up to then, sonny?”

Sonny!  That made my day. I’m only a few years from a free bus pass myself, but this guy was ninety if he was a day. And wearing slippers, which presumably was why I hadn’t heard his approach.

I thanked him for his vigilence. And meant it. Three years of acting suspiciously had gone by since the last time I was challenged. I suggested he telephone the number on the To Let board and (fingers crossed) get confirmation that I was angel rather than demon.

As a biker who is regularly pissed off by the antics of other bikers (and cyclists, who are just as bad yet see themselves as eco-saints), I sink further into resigned gloom when I see that an EU directive combined with the usual British inability to organize or fund anything means that even fewer bikers will get trained or insured.

There used to be 260 motorcycle test centres. Now a more complicated bike test means that there are only going to be 66 test centres. So you won’t be able to book a test. So if you were already dreading taking the test this will be what convinces you not to bother a) with the test, but b) and more importantly, not to bother with a training centre because the test they book for you as part of the package will be at the other end of the country and at the other end of the year.

I’ve always been a biker but it’s particularly useful for my job, working as I do in South-West London. If I’m called out between 0800 and 0930 or between 1700 and 1830 I go on the bike as the van would take forever and stress-reduce the tiny bit of the rest of my life that wasn’t in the van. Of course I get some stick about this from other locksmiths who don’t believe you can be organized enough to work from a bike. They have arguments amongst themselves along the lines of, “You must be joking mate, you can’t call yourself a locksmith using a Somevanorother, it’s too small. You need a Yetanothervan like mine. I bought it second-hand from the local elephant ambulance service and added a workbench with a vice.” I tease them by turning up to shared jobs on roller blades and with a rucksack.

And let’s not let car drivers off the hook. Because of the reduced personal risk, an even smaller percentage of them bother with lessons, tests and insurance. And what are the police doing? The police are fighting their own email and computer systems and the paperwork that the computer systems were meant to replace. If you see a police officer on the street they’re going to work or coming back. You might read a couple of the blogs in the blogroll — whichendbites and The Policman’s Blog if you haven’t already.

Does anyone else work from a bike? Anyone know where you get those compact ladders that bike-based handymen use? I seriously want one of those.

Where’s the best place to keep a spare key once you’ve made sure that a good friend who never goes out or on holiday has one? The pocket of your dressing gown.

The second most likely situation for a lockout is if you ever decide it won’t hurt to get the milk/shut the gate/pull the bin back from the street/rescue a bird from the cat/… in your dressing gown. Murphy’s Law clearly states that that is when the sudden gust of wind will come from nowhere and blow the door shut with you only half-decent and half-way down the garden path.

Incidentally, some say that it should have been named Sod’s Law. Actually it was Finagle’s Law, which only goes to show that (s)he was right.

And the most likely situation where you will lock yourself out? Moving day. As if the stresses of a move weren’t already enough, unfamiliarity with locking mechanisms and the new location of the hall table mean that a lot of people lock themselves out whilst moving in. Keep all your keys in your pockets at all times for the first ten days of living in a new place.

I had to open a safe in a library the other day. It wasn’t in some backroom, it was out in the main reading area. It was a simple little thing with little residual value and they’d already ordered a replacement, so drilling it open rather than picking it open was a cheaper option for them. Every time I fired up the drill, though, two or three people would look up from their book and over toward my direction. No-one actually went, “Ssshhh”, however. Pity really; I couldn’t help feeling that they didn’t know their parts properly.

It was nice to be in a large, well-lit room, though. Although I started working on safes thinking that I’d be more comfortable than when kneeling on a doorstep in a wet and windy doorway — inside, warm, dry, nice carpet to kneel on — it turns out that most safes are crammed into the tiniest, badly lit, uncomfortable corner of the grottiest uncarpeted storeroom you can imagine. The oddest location was a safe that was in the staff toilet. It was quite a tall safe so I actually had somewhere to sit [sic] for once.

I had a couple of safes to open a little while back. One was an elderly Chubb and the other was a more recent Dudley. Both were key locks. Safes are divided roughly 60:40 in the UK between key locks and combination locks whereas in the States they’re nearly all combination locks. Of course, key locks are much more difficult for the safe engineer to open. Anyway, these two need different techniques so I started with the one that needed the venerable Hobbs pick. (I’ll come back to Mr Hobbs another day in another post.)

First you get as comfortable as you can. Other locksmiths poke fun at my collapsible chairs but hey. Then you get acquainted with the levers — seven in this case. You’re doing a couple of things here but it’s quite repetitious. You either get bored on unlucky days or you enter a Zen-like altered state on lucky days. This was a lucky day.

I wasn’t aware of it — that’s the point — but after five minutes there was almost nothing in my mind except a growing picture of my friends the levers. What I was also unaware of was that the lights had gone out; this was a basement of a delicatessen undergoing refurbishment and they’d cut the power to install some board or other and they’d told everyone but me.

So there I was in a gloomy corner, dressed in black (good for the image), forehead resting on a safe door, making no noise except for the occasional and pleasing click of a tumbler; and there was the electrics board that was about to be replaced, above my head. The electrician walked in pointing her torch high up at the board. I wouldn’t have heard her even if she’d been wearing wooden clogs.

I think we both screamed. I certainly lost all the levers.

Still, I don’t normally need meditation classes.

Having tried and failed to get a blog working using BlogEngine.NET on my usual web site host, I was trying Google’s Blogger. (BlogEngine seems to have its home page inexorably hard-coded to default.aspx and my host won’t allow ASP.NET applications to run in sub-folders, so BlogEngine effectively took over my site.)

I have thought of a cunning plan for switching my web site from the Windows platform to a Linux platform, however. So here goes. The blog should now be running on Word Press on my new Linux host.

Blogger was pretty good and I have no complaints, but it’s nicer to have things closer to home.

“The man on the Clapham omnibus” is one of those interesting legal phrases, along with “a reasonable man” and a “man of good character”. In the UK in the early 20th century, Clapham — where I happen to live and work — represented “ordinary” London, and a user of its public transport was a hypothetical someone against whom reasonable behaviour and expectations might be judged.

(Since then Clapham suffered a gradual decline and then a rapid boom in the yuppie years.)

“(Wo)Man of good character” is a phrase whereby the barristers and judges in a courtroom in the UK (and Canada?) can tell the jury that a witness or defendant doesn’t have a criminal record, or is a lying low-life who shouldn’t be believed, without actually mentioning a criminal record. The mad thing is that the judge can actually explain this to the jury.