Security is a necessary evil, of course. The keycard on the outer doors of the building? Well, there is a lot of riffraff around this part of downtown. The keycard on the elevators? Can’t have people wandering the floors after hours. The keycard on the floor doors? Gotta be able to tell the employees from non-employees.
But now they’re putting key locks on *every individual office door*. It’s not entirely new; a number of people in the company have had locks on their doors for a long time now due to expensive, portable equipment they have (we’ve had laptops stolen before, likely by delivery people who pop in and see nobody around), but now everyone gets one.
It’s not because we don’t trust each other. All of the locks will actually all work off the same key, so all of us can get into each others’ offices if necessary. What it’s actually for is to protect us from our subtenants.
A while back I had to move my office since we’re subleasing some of our space to another company to save on costs. No problem — until we discovered that we can’t build walls between us and them. The section they took is positioned such that the corridors leading between us *have* to remain open in order to comply with fire codes. We’ve put doors up instead, but again to satisfy the fire codes they have to remain unlocked.
So, next month, we’re going to have completely unknown people with access to our floor space as well, and the paranoia’s been gradually greeping upwards, culminating in the installation of all these door locks.
One more lock isn’t really a big deal, but it’s annoying to have yet another daily ritual I have to incoporate…
Heh. That sounds like Credit Card Services back in Oregon. We had to badge in and out, even – if you didn’t badge out, your badge wouldn’t work the next morning when you tried to come in. Security wouldn’t let you in. You had to trot over to Building B to get a temporary pass. Once you got into your buildiing with the temp pass, they would reset your regular badge. Pretty dumb. We used to joke about having to badge in and out of our cubes, badge to go pee, etc. Need to flush? Beeep. Heh. I can see where your company’s coming from, though, given the equipment you work around.