The locksmith last week mentioned a product he sells for people who regularly lock themselves out of their house. It’s a locked box that sits in your garden, which requires only a PIN(*) to open. Inside you keep a spare key. A kind of high-tech version of hiding a key under the mat / in a flowerpot / in a fake rock in the rockery.
Personally, I don’t lock myself out. It’s only ever happened once, and that was only because a visitor snibbed a lock that wasn’t meant to be snibbed. So I said thanks, but no thanks. And though I’m unlikely to ever need it, I think a better strategy for me is leaving a spare key with nearby relatives.
I suppose the other requirement of such a product is that you can remember a PIN. Maybe the next step is one that works on fingerprint ID.
(*) It’s a PIN, not a PIN Number. I suppose one could call it a PI Number.
4 replies on “The key box”
I want a door that is opened cos it reads my palm print as I turn the handle and recognises me. That would be a pretty good way to unlock a door, wouldn’t it? Plus! You’d never lose it or need a spare.
in whistler, canada i’d say almost half the houses have those pin pad lockboxes. there are also door locks that have a pin pad so you dont even need a key. they are used there so much because alot of homes are short term rental or ski weekend places and its more secure than having keys for people to collect and loose. i also lived in a place there that had swipe card door locks… no keys, no codes…
now i’m back in australia and i moved into a house in the inner city where we have a metal security door, front door and back door with locks and deadlocks on each… i have to keep reminding myself to take my huge bunch of keys with me and to lock the door behind me when i leave… i’m sure it wont be long before its second nature again.
Unless of course you happened to have your hand amputated that day. Then I guess you’d need someone to bring out the override palm print to reconfigure the lock.
PIN number. kind of like ATM machine. a pet hate although i do actually tend to catch myself saying them every now & then.