Neighborhood Watch

I wonder why no one ever calls the police on me.

Several times a week I’m called upon to replace a mailbox lock for which the key has been lost. I usually end up standing at the community mailbox cluster for some number of minutes picking the lock and then swapping it out for a new one. I always encourage my customers to wait in the comfort of their homes for me to arrive with a new set of mailbox keys (mostly because I don’t like people hovering as I work). As I stand at the mailbox with my unmarked cargo van just a few feet away, neighbors will walk, drive, bike, and jog by me, but no one ever stops to say anything to me about trying to break into a mailbox.

Once a customer called me because her mailbox had been pried open and her mail stolen. As I worked on replacing that lock, a neighbor from a few houses down came out into the street and filmed me with his cell phone until, when I noticed what he was doing, I smiled and waved. He scowled and scuttled back into his house. After I finished the job, I armed myself with a business card and walked by the two Hummers and the Porsche in his driveway en route to his front door. No one answered when I knocked.

Another time one of my regular clients sent me to change the locks on a condominium she was managing. The keys had been lost and I had to pick the lock to get in. This was the middle of the day and it was not a particularly easy lock, so I was conspicuously trying to get into this apartment for quite a few minutes. The neighbor across the hall cracked his door and crankily asked me what I was doing. I explained the situation and offered him a business card. No need, he told me, holding up his hand. He’d already taken down my license plate number.

These instances were rare exceptions in which people noticed me working near their homes. I want neighbors to be curious. Just as I’d want my own neighbors to take an interest if they saw a stranger poking around my home, I wish that people would inquire once in a while as to why I’m trying to gain access to a mailbox or a house on their road.

It’s alright for folks to lead with friendliness, though. I’m not a very imposing guy. Nobody needs to show their teeth when approaching me. I’m probably less threatening than your average 97-year-old WWII veteran, though perhaps a little more so than his osteoporosis-ridden wife. I’d say the average Vietnam vet could thrash me with ease.

I don’t wish to be attacked as I work — not physically by old war veterans, and not verbally by cranky window watchers. But I would like to see that people have enough interest in the well-being of their neighbors to politely question why I’m doing something a little suspicious on their streets. Unfortunately, the reality seems to be that that kind of behavior is not very common. Neighbors tend not to be the best line of defense against burglaries and mail theft. I would guess that this is doubly true for those who don’t take the time to meet their neighbors.

Locksmith Roots

When I started locksmithing at the Cerrajería Ruíz in Mexico City, I’d frequently show up to a job and not have what I needed to complete it. It was sometimes necessary to hop on my bicycle and make one or two runs for tools and supplies before the job was done. Once when I apologized to a customer for the delay, he said, “What are you going to do—bring the entire shop with you in your backpack?” Because that’s what I carried—a single backpack full of tools. Sometimes I think back on what that guy said and chuckle because now I do in fact bring an entire shop with me. My van is not big enough to accommodate every last item I might need, but by asking the right questions before I show up, I’m able to complete the vast majority of jobs in one visit.

I was reminded of all this earlier this week when my van broke down and was out of commission for a day. My van is a rolling shop, and being without it makes my job much more difficult. The solution was to rent a sedan and stuff as many tools and supplies as I could into the trunk. Though I didn’t have my workbench to sit at, most of what I might need was in that trunk. Even with about eight backpacks’ worth of tools and supplies, I still felt crippled without my regular workspace.

That backpack I used in Mexico really just fit the bare essentials. Along with some basic hand tools and a baggie full of lock parts, I carried around a small pill bottle that was half-full with pins and springs of various sizes. Usually I didn’t need to touch them unless something sprung out of a lock and rolled into a crack in the floor. If I had to rekey a lock, I would take its pins out, reorder them, and then put them back in the lock. Then I’d use a round file to cut a new key to match the new pin sequence. If the customer wanted two keys, I’d hand-cut a second one. If he wanted a third, I’d tell him to go to hell. Cutting keys by hand is a lot of work. Each guy at the shop had a slightly different style and method of cutting his keys, and you could often tell who made a key just by the shapes of the cuts.

Here in the States, my time is too valuable for all that. I drive around with a bin of pre-cut keys and thousands of pins sorted into different sizes. The old keys and old pins are thrown into a bin for recycling and the lock gets new pins. If a customer wants extra keys, I use the well-calibrated duplication machine in my van to make as many copies of the original as are requested. If I need to make a car key, I can often find a blind key code, convert that to an actual key code using a web-based service available on my smart phone, and then perfectly cut the key to factory measurements. This is far easier than pulling the door apart to remove its lock cylinder, and then hand-cutting a key to match it.

I do travel around with boxes of used parts so that I can fix or replace broken locks at little added cost to the customer. This is the kind of thing we did in Mexico, and I find myself wasting huge amounts of time trying to make parts work together when they weren’t intended to do so, or installing a piece of used hardware to only then remember why it was removed in the first place. It would be so much easier to swap out the old locks for shiny new ones at a healthy markup. In Mexico the customers were suspicious if we told them their fifty-year-old locks were broken beyond repair. I understand the value of time—both mine and that of my customers—and yet I still do this. It’s partly due to my reluctance to run up the bill, and partly because I just get much more satisfaction out of repairing a lock than replacing it.

Adapting the practices I learned as an apprentice in a Mexican locksmith shop to the realities of a first-world economy is an ongoing process, but I’ll never regret that I learned how to do things the hard way before I learned how to do them the easy way..

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.