Is your window open?

I go out on all kinds of service calls. What I enjoy most is residential lockouts. They often require a bit of skill and problem-solving, people are happy to see me when I show up, and I feel a certain sense of accomplishment when I’m finished.

I don’t think I’m giving away a big trade secret when I say that about half the time I go to perform a lockout in a single-family dwelling—a house, that is—I’m able to find an open window. Usually I ask the resident if any windows are unlocked. Invariably the answer is a confident “no”. I always check anyway. In the end, the client either looks chagrined over being proven wrong, or smug in his vindication. I used to ask over the phone before going out on the lockout call whether there were any open windows. I learned my lesson about doing that the time I arrived to discover the client had decided to give the windows one last check after telling me that none were open. That was a wasted trip on a Sunday afternoon.

Sometimes I worry that getting in through a window is like cheating. People call a locksmith and they want to see a show. Opening a window and climbing through it like a burglar isn’t that. On the other hand, most people also just want to get into their homes as quickly as possible, and checking for open windows facilitates that. The lock picks stay in my pocket until all easier methods have failed.

The other night I went on a very late call and started looking around the house for unlocked windows. I found one in back that looked to be a good candidate and the client told me she’d already checked it. That didn’t stop me from pushing at it and seeing it slide open. I understand how she could have made that mistake. It’s all about expectations. A window can be a little bit difficult to open from the outside. If you don’t expect it to be open, you might interpret the little bit of resistance as confirmation that it’s not. Because my expectation when I show up to a job is that there is an easy way in, I don’t give up when a window doesn’t immediately give.

So if you get back from a vacation on which you’ve lost your keys, check your windows before calling for a locksmith. Also, before you leave for that vacation, check to make sure all your windows are secured. Locksmiths aren’t the only ones who know to check for open windows.

Newfangled Digital Locks

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about installing digital keypad locks on people’s front doors. Schlage and Kwikset are offering a number of increasingly affordable options for keypad-operated levers and deadbolts. I have mixed thoughts about them.

On the one hand, they’re awesome! They light up, they chirp, and they add digitization into yet another aspect of our lives. Some of them link into smart home systems and can be remotely programmed to provide and deny access to incidental visitors. Instead of giving a cleaner or short-term house guest a key that can be secretly duplicated, you can give out an entry code and delete it whenever you want. And they allow you to go without a key. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal to have a ring of keys in your pocket, but there will likely come a day when people will think it strange and backwards that we all carried these jangly bunches of metal around with us at all times. If the world is going to start moving toward fancy computer locks, Redmond, WA is an appropriate place for that trend to take off.

From a security standpoint, many of these locks are pretty solid. Most of the Schlage models meet ANSI Grade 1 standards. I personally don’t know an easy way to bypass the keypad yet; if I want to get through one of these I have to pick the lock cylinder. But it’s not hard to imagine that someone will figure out a way to do it, and then it will be necessary to rethink the way these locks are designed. That’s true of mechanical locks as well.

I do have some reservations about these new locks. Most of them are battery-operated, and batteries fail. They usually give you a warning that the battery is dying. But changing the batteries on a deadbolt is the kind of thing that many of us tend to put off until it’s too late. If the lock also works with a key (that you happen to have access to when you really need it), then you’re fine. Otherwise you may be locked out when the batteries finally give out. I recommend against getting a lock that takes no key at all.

Installation is supposed to be pretty easy, as you can supposedly replace your old lock with the new one without boring any new holes. The thing is that it’s extremely common for a deadbolt’s throw to be poorly aligned with its strike, which means that you have to push or pull the door a little to get it into position before you can operate the lock. That’s easy enough for you to do, but try getting your digital lock’s four AA-batteries to push the door into place so it can engage or disengage the throw. It’s impossible. These locks don’t leave any room for error in installation. And with the way our doors swell during these wet Seattle winters, a lock that’s installed perfectly in the summer might start to malfunction a few months later. Though this is fixed easily enough, the point is that it’s not always as plug-and-play as it suggests on the box. But when was it ever?

My biggest qualm with these locks is that they introduce a new expense into our lives. You can get a good lock for $30, which, if installed correctly, will last for thirty years. I don’t have any evidence to support this yet, but I just can’t help doubting the longevity of a piece of electronics that’s mounted to the outside of a door in a famously wet climate. I predict that these locks will start to go bad after 7 to 10 years. So instead of the deadbolt costing $1 per annum, you might be dividing the cost of a $120- or $180-deadbolt over a much shorter stretch, and finding that your deadbolt expense is now ten or twenty times what it used to be. Also, you might end up spending more of your life servicing, replacing, and thinking about home security hardware than you ever needed to before.

Take these complaints with a grain of salt, as they’re coming from a guy who’s spendthrift, averse to change, and late to adopt new technologies. If you want to buy one of these locks, go with Schlage instead of Kwikset, and avoid the knockoff brands. Try installing it yourself. If you run into trouble, give me a call. I promise not to grumble.

$75 for 30 seconds of work?!

Sometimes I hear people complain about having to pay locksmiths $60 or $70 or $80 for the half a minute it takes to unlock a car. I get that. It can be embarrassing and expensive to have to call for a lockout service. And then we often do make fast work of it (though it’s very rare I get a car door open in under a minute, as I generally try to manipulate the lock before resorting to other methods of getting in).

Last night a guy called me after supper and asked me what it would cost to come to the bar he was at and unlock his car. I looked at my watch and quoted him what seemed to me like a reasonable after-hours rate of $75. He hung up on me. (It was only after the call that I realized his speech had been a little slurred, and then I started considering the ethics of enabling someone to drive home drunk.)

I thought about that call again when, several hours later, another guy roused me from a deep sleep to come to a gas station in Bellevue and make a working copy of his broken car key. I said it would be $100. He was happy with the figure, as others had quoted him prices upwards of $200.

For many jobs, the majority of the money I charge is just showing-up money. Once I arrive, the work itself is usually pretty easy for me. I expect to be compensated for showing up on a moment’s notice with a van full of tools and a head full of pertinent knowledge. During the day I’m rarely willing to go on a service call that’s going to bring in less than $60, and late at night I want at least $100 to drag myself out of bed.

But to say that opening a car only requires 30 seconds of work is like saying that scary things go away when you close your eyes. A locksmith doesn’t just appear out of nowhere like a genie, and then vanish back into his lamp when the job is done. There’s all kinds of stuff behind the scenes that the customer never sees: shelling out money for tools, endless licensing fees, insurance, advertising, vehicle maintenance, and gasoline; being abruptly pulled away from some other activity to bolt out the door and help a stranger out of a jam; the slight feeling of unease that pollutes said activity — in truth, every activity — because of the possibility that a call might suddenly disrupt it; spending time in a service vehicle driving to and from the job; and getting home from the last job of the night to do the daily accounting, order new key blanks, design marketing materials, correspond with clients and venders, and read up on new security trends. That thirty seconds of work is supported by countless hours of preparation, years’ of accumulated knowledge, and a potentially long drive in a very rattly van.

So I’ll close with the old anecdote about the factory manager who has to call in a technician because his large piece of production equipment stops working. The elderly technician shows up, takes a couple turns around the room-sized machine, stops at a certain spot, and then gives the machine a sharp kick. The machine coughs and then sputters back to life. The technician turns to the manager and says, “That’ll be $800.”

“What?!” the manager blurts out. “That’s ridiculous! All you did was kick it. I need to see a fully itemized invoice before I can pay you a cent!”

Two days later an invoice arrives in the mail. Here’s what it says:

MACHINE REPAIR

Kicking the machine………………………………$5
Knowing where to kick the machine………….$795

Dog Days

I encountered a lot of dogs as I went to change and service the locks in people’s homes this week. They included:

– A fourteen-year-old Great Pyrenees, easily the fattest dog I’ve ever seen. Its hips were shot and it was bow-legged like an old lady. He watched inquisitively as I swapped out all the locks in the house. When I petted him, the owner told me that he never lets men get near him like that.

– A Pomeranian with all of her hair buzzed off. She looked and acted very much like Gizmo, the Mogwai from Gremlins. I crouched down to pet her and she was very friendly. Then she started sniffing at my crotch and I had to stand up so as not to look like a perverted locksmith. She napped in her bed as I replaced her owner’s bad deadbolt lock.

– A Chihuahua. She barked at me from the moment I walked up to the front door until the moment I extended my hand for her to smell, whereupon she lost interest and walked off.

– Two excitable Australian shepherds — siblings, by the owner’s account. One of them was four times the size of the other. The big one sniffed my hand and shambled off. The other one barked at me continuously as I removed a deadbolt. As I was reaching to unscrew a digital lock from high on the door, he bit me.

– A yappy black poodle. I tried to introduce myself when I entered the house, but he backed away, yapping. For every second that I was in the house, the dog was yapping at me. The only respite came when I went to change a lock in the the master bedroom, where apparently the dog had been trained not to enter. Then he yapped from the doorway. Near the end of the job I got fed up and stared him in the eyes as I walked him down. He backed away, yapping at me. Then he ran away, still yapping, and leaving a trail of pee on the hardwood floor. I was embarrassed I’d scared him. And the owner was embarrassed about her yappy dog.

Trusting Your Locksmith

The other day I rekeyed some locks and installed some deadbolts for a client who was recently separated from her husband. As I was working, she looked at me with an eyebrow cocked and asked how she could be certain that I wouldn’t keep a copy of her key. I told her that she couldn’t be.

I also said a few more things.

I told her that I’ve worked hard to build a strong reputation as an honest locksmith who does good work for a fair price. I told her that my livelihood is completely dependent upon this reputation. I told her that I’m easily searchable on the web — the source of the bulk of my business — and that any such abuse of my clients’ trust would immediately appear on the Internet and tank my career as a locksmith.

There were some things I forgot to mention. I forgot to mention that I’m licensed, which means the state has confirmed I don’t have a criminal record. And I forgot to mention that I’m bonded. To work as a locksmith in this state it is required that I have a $6,000 bond to cover a client’s losses if something is stolen or if I skip out on a job; I have a $12,000 bond. It’s a good idea to confirm the licensing and bonding credentials of anyone that you hire to do work in your home or business. Here’s where you can check that:

https://secure.lni.wa.gov/verify/

A few weeks ago a client told me that the last locksmith she hired came back and stole all the screens off her house. She didn’t know for certain it was him, but he was the most likely suspect. That made me wonder: if he worked on her locks and had the opportunity to keep a key copy for himself, why would he have only grabbed items that required no access to the house at all? This story got me to thinking that if one of my clients is ever the victim of a break-in shortly after I finish my work, I will be under suspicion. This is unfortunate for me because the reality is that when people call me for security upgrades, it’s because they perceive that there’s a real danger of a home invasion. If and when a home is burglarized right after I do a job there, I pray the intruder kicks or pries his way in.

The bottom line is this: if you don’t have a great deal of faith in the integrity of your locksmith — or, again, anyone working in your home or business — you shouldn’t be granting him access to your keys and your security equipment. If I show up and you don’t like the cut of my jib, pay me my small service call fee and send me on my way. My feelings might be hurt, but you’ll be able to preserve your peace of mind. And much of the time, that’s what I’m in the business of selling.

These Eyes

I spent the day installing a bunch of locks into wooden doors and setting them up on a master key system. As the day progressed, my eyes became increasingly tired. My vision was very blurry and it was hard to see the pins and springs that I was working with. I started misplacing small lock parts and wasting time groping around for them like an old blind man. By late afternoon, the problem was seriously impeding my work. And it was getting me depressed about the future. My eyesight isn’t going to get better over time.

Finally, frustrated, I gave my eyes a break. I put my glasses down on the work bench in my van and administered an eyeball massage. When I reached for my glasses to get back to work, I saw that the lenses were thoroughly coated in sawdust. I wiped them off, put them back on, and immediately returned to full capacity.

Double-Cylinder Deadbolts

A double-cylinder deadbolt is the type that requires a key to lock it and unlock it from both sides of the door. It doesn’t have a thumbturn like a single-cylinder deadbolt. Once every so often we see a story in the news about a woman escaping decades of captivity in the home of some pervert who didn’t have any friends in high school, usually in upstate New York or western Pennsylvania. I would imagine that every one of the dwellings involved in those stories is outfitted with double-cylinder deadbolts on all the doors. For reasons wholly unrelated to child abduction, I hate to see these locks installed in homes where small children live.

A customer in Sammamish called me the other day to have me install one on his front door. His neighbor had just been burglarized. The intruder broke the window next to the single-cylinder deadbolt, reached his arm in, turned the bolt with his hand, and helped himself to the flat-screen television. So it’s not only perverts who install these deadbolts. Folks who like their flat-screen TVs also use them. I asked him if there were any kids in the house and then declined to do the job.

Double-cylinder deadbolts are illegal in Washington State, which requires that builders and contractors adhere to the International Residential Code. Section R311.4.4 states:

“All egress doors shall be readily openable from the side from which egress is to be made without the use of a key or special knowledge or effort.”

I didn’t suspect this client of being a depraved and disgusting lunatic. Rather, I was concerned about his two young children in the event of a fire. If the house was filled with smoke and flames and the door was locked with a key, it could pose a very significant problem to anyone inside—I dare say a much larger one than the loss of a flat-screen television.

I did throw out the idea of calling some window installers to inquire into putting security film over the windows flanking his front door, which would prevent the glass from shattering if struck. This is not something that I would choose to bother with, but he wanted to be proactive in the wake of this recent criminal activity in his quiet neighborhood. I also suggested putting a dog bone on the front porch and an alarm system sticker in the window. These are small but potentially effective deterrents that might make a burglar skip past a house and move on to the next.

Lastly, I directed him to the website of the National Crime Prevention Council, which publishes a helpful home security checklist. It’s a worthwhile document for any new homeowner to look over. Unsurprisingly, none of the items on the list prioritize crime prevention over fire safety, and neither do I.

www.ncpc.org/cms-upload/ncpc/File/homechk2.pdf

Are peep holes safe?

A customer asked me if getting a peep hole installed would introduce a security risk to his home. He’d read about people getting shot through their doors when they go to look through their peep holes, or burglars using them to get at the deadbolt’s thumb turn.

Suspecting that was a bunch of hooey, I went searching online for evidence of this. I couldn’t find a single article citing these dangers that didn’t also recommend a product that was appreciably more expensive than a peep hole. It’s just another case of vendors of unnecessary junk trying to scare us into buying their wares.

Peep holes are fine. If you’re aware that there’s someone out there so intent upon doing you in that getting shot at through your front door is a legitimate concern, maybe you should reevaluate how you’re living your life. And if a burglar wanted to gain access to the inside part of your deadbolt through a tiny hole in the door, wouldn’t it be easier to just drill a new one closer to the lock than to futz around with the removal of a peephole? Or better yet, couldn’t he just kick your door in? Most doors can be kicked in.

We don’t live in an action movie universe. A clutch of ninjas isn’t going to come to your door to assassinate you, and international sex traffickers aren’t going to steal you from your suburban home. (I realize that “clutch” is the collective noun for chickens, but I think it works pretty well for ninjas, too.) What IS going to happen is your mother-in-law is going to show up unannounced, expecting to be let in. And your attractive neighbor might knock on your door to ask if it’s okay to block your driveway for a few minutes. In these cases, it will be nice to know who’s at the door so you can decide whether it’s appropriate to pretend you’re not home (mother-in-law) or to throw on a baseball cap so it’s not so obvious you haven’t showered yet even though the day is half over (neighbor).

Sure, there are a few dangerous people out in the world. It’s best to try not to draw their attention or their ire. Maybe we should even take a few measures to prevent them from breezing into our homes. But we can’t live in fear of all the crazy things that might happen. Get yourself some homeowner’s or renter’s insurance, put a reasonable deadbolt on your door (installed with long screws to prevent kick-ins), be good to people, and sleep soundly. You’ll be fine. Also, tell your mother-in-law to call first. If she doesn’t listen, get yourself a peep hole.

My name is David, and I’ve locked myself out…

Yesterday I got a call from a woman who’d found me on Angie’s List because her neighbor was locked out of the house. I was in Seattle and the caller was in the easternmost part of Woodinville. The time and gas I’d have to expend on the job would just about cancel out my fee, but I agreed to come out anyway. I have a hard time saying “no”.

What I found when I arrived was that the customer had gotten a new doorknob for her garage that would open from the inside even when it was locked. So she walked out and closed the door behind her, not realizing she was locking herself out. She felt really dumb. I assured her that everything was fine, that she was a great person and that she wasn’t dumb at all. Then I picked the lock and settled up with her. Imagining that this wouldn’t be the last time that new doorknob would get the better of her, I offered to cut her a free key that she could tuck away in her garage somewhere. She gave me a copy of her house key and I went to the van and made the duplicate. When I came back to the garage to test it — I always test the key — it wouldn’t turn the knob. I scratched my head. Then I went around to the front door and tested it there, and it worked perfectly. I shrugged and handed the key over to the customer and we said our farewells.

Twenty minutes later I got a call from the same neighbor, who handed the phone over to the customer I’d just helped. She’d locked herself out again.

–But I gave you a key. You didn’t leave it inside, did you?

–No, no. I have the key. It doesn’t work.

–You know it goes to the front door, right?

–Yes, yes. Front door. Doesn’t work. Please come.

In fifteen minutes I was back at her house. Now she was feeling really dumb, and almost embarrassed beyond words. The front door was slightly ajar. Inside there was a security chain keeping it from opening. I hadn’t thought about that. I went back around to the garage and picked the cylinder on the new doorknob again, settled up with the customer, and cut her another key, this time for her garage door. That must have been really frustrating for her.

I deal with people nearly every day who have locked themselves out. Almost invariably they’re feeling foolish. Having encountered a sizable sample of such people, I think I can fairly say that people who are locked out of their homes and cars are not any less intelligent than the average person. And I’ve locked myself out before. Once I locked myself out of my car while it was running. Another time I locked myself out of my own apartment twice in a single day. Once I dropped my keys in a snow bank and I couldn’t find them. And almost once a day I lock the door of my van, close it, and am then momentarily stricken with panic as I check my pocket for my keys and find that I haven’t locked them in the van. (That’s one of my biggest fears — locking my keys and phone in the van while on a job, and then having to use the customer’s phone to call a locksmith.) I keep telling myself that I need to cut a few extra copies of my own keys in case I ever get locked out. I’d bet that all of my clients have had that thought from time to time as well.

Fear

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.

That kind of fear is something I used to feel all the time as a kid–when a dog was chasing me down a country road; when I was losing my grip as I tried to get down from a tree up which I’d climbed too high; when I was on an amusement park ride with safety equipment too large to securely hold me in. That emotion brings distinct physiological reactions that are difficult to describe or mistake. As an adult, it’s a rare and familiar sensation that most of us try to avoid.

That moment came to mind yesterday when I was meeting with a customer outside of her house and she came face to face with an unwelcome visitor, who happened to be the very reason I was at her home in the first place. Though I’m not always great at recognizing emotions, I could see that this visitor was invoking in her what the bad driver had from me. She did her best to conceal the fear, to hold it together until she was safely inside her house with the door shut behind her and the visitor on the other side of it. Then it became more obvious.

I wondered for a moment if a hug was in order. I’m not a hugger by nature, but I know that some people appreciate hugs in these situations. But too much bad might have come from that. My attempt at comforting her might have been met with one of those awkward one-shoulder hugs that women sometimes give. Like bad handshakes, they feel to me like insults and they linger unpleasantly in my mind. Worse yet, a misplaced hug could have led to a very damaging Yelp review. Instead I began to ask her about her locks.

I’m a locksmith because I like fixing problems. I’d fix every problem if I could. Not knowing the backstory in this situation, the most I could do was the job that I was called there for. I hope the other issues resolved themselves. It doesn’t feel good to be afraid.