Lock Down

The door to my building has a time-lock on it. This is a vast improvement over the old-fashioned “management sends someone to lock the door every night” method that the building used the first time I considered renting space here.

Now there is a fancy keypad on the door that automatically locks at 7 p.m. and automatically unlocks at 6 a.m. Except on weekends apparently, when it just stays locked. Which would be a royal pain in my behind if I worked on weekends.

Theoretically, every tenant in the building gets their own four-digit code that will override the lock and let them, their employees, their clients, or whoever they give the code to, in.

I’m not sure what the issue is with the lock. It seems like a perfectly fine solution to a building with multiple business tenants who may — or may not — want people to have access to their offices after regular business hours. But, somehow, people just can’t seem to manage the simple task of figuring out how our door works.

I keep saying I’m going to sit on the park bench across the street someday and video people trying to get in the door.

Most people walk up to the door, see the keypad, and automatically assume the door is locked and you need a code to get in. They then walk away without trying the handle.

Many people will try the handle, and not be able to open the door. Sometimes this is because they don’t turn the lever-style handle. Sometimes it’s because they pull it up, counterclockwise, which does not unlatch the door. Sometimes it’s because they don’t turn the handle all the way down to unlatch the door. A lot of times it’s because they insist on pushing on the door instead of pulling.

Sometimes the latch just sticks. Especially in the winter when the differing metals that make up the latching mechanism have different rates of expansion and contraction and refuse to cooperate with one another.

All I know is that the time-lock keypad element is often missing. It gets broken somehow, someway, and the locksmith in charge of the thing has to come down and remove it entirely from the door and take it back to his shop to fix it.

Yesterday, a girl from our property management office came around handing out keys. Because it’s going to be another week (at least) before we get our time lock back. So they’ve installed a rather unattractive, ordinary lock on the door in the meantime. Which, for reasons I fail to understand, isn’t keyed to match the key lock from the original lock...which everyone already has a key for.

Now we’re back to the old fashioned “someone has to come and manually lock the door every night” method of securing the building.

At least now everyone has cell phones. They can call me or text me to let me know when they arrive, so I can leave my suite on the fourth floor, go downstairs, open the door for my client, and we can ride the elevator back to the salon together.

Oh the joys of working in an old building in a city where we don’t have old buildings.