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Sunday, January 9, 2011

Locks

I unlocked my front door’s deadbolt this morning, hit the auto-unlock on my little car, and heard the satisfying click of the thumb latch as the front door snapped shut behind me. I ate breakfast with a friend in a restaurant that never closes and doesn’t have a lock on their front door–they throw a chain and padlock across the crash bars in case they have to close unexpectedly.

My friend tells me that on mornings when we eat together, he runs ahead of schedule and is the first at his office. On those mornings, he unlocks their front door and punches in the code to deactivate their security system. Each morning, he logs into his corporate server with a personal password, accessing client and personnel files until calling it a day.

My debit card doesn’t work unless you punch in "3VOM." I’ve linked my PayPal account to Overstock, iTunes, Amazon, and eBay in order to make online shopping convenient, but only after typing in the mystery pin phrase that prevents online phishing programs from accessing my online data. Hopefully, this makes it a little tougher for people out to steal Scott Wheeling’s identity and protects me from hacking.

Before turning fairly ridiculous, movies like Eagle Eye and Minority Report raise a not-too-subtle voice to the issue of being watched, self protection, and privacy. But when we leave the house to visit the silver screen, why do we lock the door behind us? Why does the school janitor carry a belt loop full of keys? Why is the keycard at your average hotel (yuck, bedbugs) only coded to your door?

After 20 years, my friend’s father installed a lock on the front door to their split level home in rural New York. A troubled niece had moved back into town, and they hoped to avoid returning home one night to find she’d pawned their valuables to pay for a nagging maple sugar habit she’d acquired at college. Their neighbors had found numerous small tools, a GPS, and sunglasses missing the previous week, and credited an unlocked side door as the likely point of entry for the opportunistic borrower.

Toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic "The Shining," Jack Nicholson’s character reminds us that locked doors only prevent honest people from getting inside a locked room. His maniacal smile tells us that if someone wants to get in badly enough, a locked door is really just a formality. Hopefully, few of us will ever have to face such an unwelcome intrusion, but the nagging question remains: when I walk away from my locked door for the day, whose hand might jiggle the handle to see if they could conveniently slip inside?

One key behind locking our doors is that we distrust. It may be our oddball neighbor, or the thought of a late night visitor with an eye on our canned goods, but fear of the unknown is a strong motivator. Why else are we so intimidated by the giant shark in Jaws, even though we don’t get a good look at the beast until the movie is nearly over?  Beyond trust is the proven poor track record of humanity–given the chance, we’ll steal from, cripple, and even eat one another–if the door’s unlocked and it’s convenient enough. Now I just need to be careful to watch who has access to my keys.

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