Locked Out
Oh Mammy dear, we're all mad over here
Livin' in America
--Livin' in America, Black 47
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This week Ranger couldn't open his safe and so had to call a locksmith. It took the locksmith some time and as he worked he spoke about his business, as his family is of long-time acquaintance.
He said now that the economy is poor the locksmithing business is doing very well. Reason: every time a business lays off an employee they must change locks, as a matter of prudence.
Additionally, a fishing friend this morning said the fishermen are not going as far off coast these days due to gas prices. In our area that means the grouper and snapper populations stand to benefit. No so much the reef fish, like redfish or trout. It is interesting to consider how cutbacks in one area impact survival of other species or human endeavors. Opportunism, parasitism, commensalism, survival of the fittest, predator-prey relations. . . all are coming into play here.
The U.S. economy lost 62,000 jobs lost last month; 438,000 for the first half of 2008 (The Economy? Words fail Me.) Interesting the ways in which one can chart trends, regardless of how rosy Washington wishes to spin it.
Labels: locksmiths and poor economy
posted by rangeragainstwar at 6:00 PM
5 Comments:
This is why all the locks here in the Silly Cone Valley are electronic. That way the system administrator (who is always the last to be laid off) just needs to disable the electronic keys of the laid-off employees (i.e., remove their keycode from the door computer) and voila, they're now locked out.
Of course, this does mean that laying off the system administrator can become, hmm, problematic...
-E
It also means that a tube of glue and a boltcutter can effectively mess up a business, since the main-lock is the determinant lock for all the others.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, fnord. The lock systems we use here in the Silly Cone Valley are independently coded RFID proximity systems. For example, I can disable the lock for the stock room to all but manufacturing personnel, while disabling the lock for the machine room to all but IT personnel. I can enable the lock for the Airlock (the rear door leading into the engineering section) for engineering personnel, while disabling it for marketing personnel. Etc. See, for example, this Hartmann proximity card electronic door lock system.
What *is* true is that a sledgehammer to the central lock control computer can effectively mess up the business big-time. That's when you hope that the business has at least one door controlled by an old-fashioned mechanical key so that someone can get in to replace the lock control computer and restore it from the off-site backups (!!!)...
-Badtux the Security Geek Penguin
bad tux,
we just got sliced bread here in n. fl AND you want us to buy electronic security systems.maybe they'll arr. in 20 years or so.
your points are all well taken but small businesses are struggling just to survive, we do not have the luxury to expend big bucks when we are just getting by. jim
I could snark about how folks in North Florida only recently discovered electronic calculators and digital watches, but it would be too close to true to be funny. (Disclaimer -- I am from a place very similar to North Florida thus am quite aware of how things are there).
But the easy access to cash to buy fancy electronic lock systems is another of the things that high oil prices are going to change about the Silly Cone Valley. Right now the Valley is full of Silly Chinese Money. All the money the Chinese make from selling cheap junk to Wal-Mart comes back to pay for high tech electronic door locks -- the Chinese still realize that they do not yet have the skill set to do without the Silly Cone Valley's huge skills base, so they co-opt it with massive amounts of cash rather than try to out-compete it. I don't mind, the Chinese pay my salary, but: now the Chinese are having to spend way more money on oil. And their dollar reserves (used to buy oil) have plummeted by 75% over the course of the past year. So pretty soon, ready or not, the Silly Cone Valley is going to have to do without Silly Chinese Money. What happens next... sigh. The Silly Cone Valley will then become the Silly Beggar Valley with more people standing on street corners with "Will Work For Food" signs than actually working...
Regarding small businesses, I suppose it depends on your definition of a small business. A sandwich shop with ten employees is a small business as defined in CFR Title 13 Part 121.201. A high-tech manufacturing startup with 400 employees is also a small business under that standard. But they are obviously on a completely different end of the "small" scale. I typically work for businesses with between 40 and 120 full-time employees, which is small, but definitely not sandwich-shop small. The electronic lock setup is far cheaper for these businesses than physical locks, even at $8K for an 8-door system, because changing all the locks and issuing new keys to all the employees would be far more expensive than the cost of the electronic proximity keyfob system, and the RFID key, if the employee walks off with it, is cheaper to replace than having a locksmith make a single copy of a physical key. But obviously for someone on the sandwich shop scale of things that is not going to be as big a deal, because the sandwich shop has only the owner/manager and a few assistant managers who have keys, and only two doors (front and back) that need re-keying if one of the assistant managers leaves...
- Badtux the Security Penguin
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