My day began weirdly, as I found myself partly awake quite early, then dozing off again, and drifting in and out of a dream....
It was one of those where I'm back in college. This time, though, I was back in the dorm, and trying to leave my room in the morning. The lock was stuck.
I somehow got out of the room (perhaps using the old out the window, around the ledge, in the fire escape trick), and found that the lock could be forced from the outside using a camera tripod as a wrench. (Don't ask me how any of this makes sense.)
I then proceeded to unwedge several other locks, while reports filtered in of stuck locks on other floors. Apparently someone had gone on a supergluing spree (how a superglued lock could be fixed with a wrench is left as an exercise for the analyst).
Meanwhile, another student had come up with a set of maintenance barcodes for the locks. (Apparently these locks had both a keyhole and a barcode scanner. Go figure.) We got busy trying to figure out which code to scan to unjam the locks (though it's not clear whether one of the special codes would perform the machanical unjamming function of the tripod/wrench, or the barcode part of the lock also needed to be unjammed from some sort of digital wedgie). Was the Master Reset code the right thing to use, or would that require the lock to be rekeyed?
At last report, I was puzzling over the maintenance codes, the minimal documentation for the locks, and some possibly-related schematics, attempting to document the whole mess to the satisfaction of the resident adviser, a cranky middle-aged woman of a nontechnical bent.
Was this trying to tell me something? Is there a product idea in there? Well, back when I was in college, barcode locks might have made sense for low-security uses; back then, the state of the art in dot-matrix printers was the DECwriter with its amazing 7-pin printhead, or one of those TI things that used the thermal paper, so printing one's own barcodes was nontrivial... and even office photocopiers didn't make copies good enough to work with the primitive barcode readers of the day. These days, it'd be just about secure against a toddler... and a simple mechanical latch requiring some combination of strength and height can perform that function just fine. So, probably no product inspiration here, unless I can somehow send the dream back in time to the year I was actually living in a dorm.
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