I was on my bicycle the other day and I got into a tricky situation in which, for half a second, it seemed certain that I was going to get flattened by a distracted driver in a very large SUV. A jolt of fear shot through me and awakened all of my senses. We both swerved frantically out of each other’s paths, tires screeching. The Excursion grazed my pant leg as it passed, then corrected itself and continued on its way. After narrowly escaping that bone-crushing accident, I was rattled. There was a palpable aftertaste of fear in the back of my mouth.

I spend a lot of time thinking about other people’s locks. The issues that concern me most are cost, aesthetics, convenience, and security, in about that order. Sometimes my customers prioritize differently and I adjust my advice accordingly.

For half of my childhood I lived in a house across the street from a pond in Upstate New York. Next door was a horse farm, up the street was a cow farm, and in the other direction there was corn. It was rural and we didn’t worry about security. The house was protected by a cheap knob on each door. They were all keyed differently and I don’t think anyone had the keys to all of them. On the rare occasion that my mother locked the front door in the winter I’d complain because it meant I’d need to trudge through the snow to get to the unlocked door in the back. To me, the locks were just a nuisance. If someone wanted to get in while we were out, they’d have all the time in the world and there would be no one to see what was happening. We were never burglarized. I doubt that anyone in that little town has ever been burglarized.

My grandparents, on the other hand, lived in South Florida. They’d been burglarized twice, so they had a security system and two deadbolts on their front door. There was a charlie bar on their sliding glass door and an entry pad that chirped urgently at us whenever we came in the door. The windows were to remain shut, as they were hooked up to the alarm. I didn’t like the aesthetics of that. I suppose it offered my grandmother a sense of security and it did a good job of protecting the tchotchkes in her etagere, but it gave me the feeling that the world outside the condo was ugly and unsafe.

In Mexico City I never saw a home with a security system, but most homes had multiple locks on their front doors. I needed to use four separate keys to get from the street to the inside of my apartment. When people started to earn a bit of money there, they’d buy a nicer lock for their front door. It was something of a status symbol. I installed a lot of mortise locks with high-security European-style cylinders. (Most of them took a key both on the inside and outside; now that I have a say, I would refuse to install something like that because of the risk it poses during a fire.) Up in the hills on the outskirts of town, the very wealthy would have me install beautiful keyless-entry locks. Swiping a hand over them would reveal a glowing keypad so a code could be entered. Some were biometric. If the right person put his thumbprint to the scanner, the bolt would quietly retract from the jamb. These locks were elegant. Many of them spoke. Some were bilingual.

Here in the Seattle area I see something different. Nearly every home is protected by Schlage or Kwikset locks that are keyed alike. The locks are often pretty, with the style and finish carefully selected to match the door. One key gets into every lock. I love the convenience of that. Most homes are fairly insecure, though. The determined criminal would be able to get in without much trouble. Back doors — the ones out of view of curious neighbors — have less protection than front doors. Vulnerable sliding glass doors are protected by nothing more than little latches.

None of this concerns me because I view enhanced security features as a greater nuisance than I do the people who would seek to bypass them. Usually when I am helping a customer with his or her security equipment, it’s to resolve a problem that the locks themselves are causing. I rarely try to upsell unless it’s clear that the resident is interested in security and not just the resolution of an immediate problem. (The exceptions might be some small adjustments I make to sliding glass doors and to French doors.) We occupy a relatively safe part of the country and burglary is not epidemic here. I imagine I’ll continue to feel this way until my own home is broken into.