FINALLY!!!
(also, as I said fucking ages ago, there must surely be a friendly BBSer who’s a TOOOL aficionado or the like within driving distance? Who nwants to be in a BoingBoing article? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)
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I don’t know Rob. The fact that this thread has gone on so long amuses me. What will i do once the safe is open?
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Reminds of the time when I locked myself out of the flat and the landlord wasn’t available. The only option was to call a locksmith. He turned up after an hour (tbf, it was a Friday night), stuck a bit of flexible plastic through the doorjamb and click, the door was open. And my bank account was £100 lighter.
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Locks (especially doorlocks) are fairly trivial to open, but requires the know-how to do so even if it isn’t complicated. So difficulty of opening a lock is irrelevant, the locksmith did his job and charged you an appropriate amount to have a professional out there to do his thing.
On a related note, my dad once lost the car keys after putting them in his swim trunks while swimming in a river. To get a locksmith out there on a weekend would’ve cost a fortune and we would’ve had to wait almost a full day. Thankfully the owner of the tubing place we did our rentals from had a kit to jimmy the lock open, i was surprised how damn easy it was to pop the lock.
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I locked myself out of my bedroom a couple years ago.
I tried to pick the lock, but was having very little luck.
Then I took a closer look at the doorframe and noticed that the light from inside the room was shining in the space between the door and the frame: the piece of wood that was supposed to prevent someone from just shoving a credit card in there and releasing the latch either wasn’t wide enough, or the door was just slightly too small for the frame.
So I shoved a credit card in and released the latch. After spending about an hour trying to pick the lock, it was literally a matter of Shove, click, pop and open in under a second.
As relieved as I was, I was like, “Really? I spent an hour at this, and that was the solution?”
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Get your money’s worth – interview them while they work to see what makes them tick, or if they have a chink.
- Do they use their bathroom door locks?
- Favorite tool?
- Scariest customer?
- Personal challenges they haven’t mastered?
- Most common locksmith injury? Most gruesome?
- What do they think is likely to be in the safe?
If they are willing to chat, tip them well.
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When the mechanism is faced the opposite direction you’ll need a wire or coat hanger hook to pop it open.
These days it seems most homes have generic easy-to-open locks for rooms inside the house. At my parents place i can open locked doors with a penny
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Most of the locks in my place are like that, but the master bedroom actually has a keyed lock.
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I know this. There’s an old joke I like, where the punchline is something like “Knocking the dent out of your car door with one knock: 50¢. Thirty years’ experience in knocking dents out: $199.50.”
I wasn’t complaining, just observing the effect of having £100 disappear with one swift movement. I learnt my lesson, and the next time I locked myself out utilized the aluminium of a beer can for a similar manoeuvre. (It would have been smarter to not lock myself out, but I’m not that smart.)
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My partner is a mechanic, and he tells a variation on that story on the reg. Mostly, when someone has spent hours and hours trying to do something it takes him minutes to accomplish. Specifically he tells it when he presents the bill.
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One of my art teachers told us a story of… Michelangelo i think? Maybe Da Vinci… where he was on the road traveling and some random guy hounded him for a sketch or portrait. Eventually he relented, whipped up a drawing in seemingly no time and told the guy to pay him his usual fee. The guy balked at the price saying it took him so little time and he told him it was because he’d spent years to be that fast.
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I think you can find a good one using the google:
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wheeling it out today. Gotta pop off that baseboard
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You’ve had how long and you’ve yet to pop the baseboard off and pull the safe out.
Your priorities are really screwed up.
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So it’s really happening?
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So are we here?
Or here?
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