Smart Solutions to Dumb Locks

App vs. Crowbar

I didn’t write anything last week as we were away on school break. We took the kids for a few days to Washington DC, for some sights and the other joys of america’s capital. There was some cool analog stuff there, including the turntable of Grandmaster Flash and the Parliament Mothership, but I’m using today’s ribbon up on a story about the stupidity of smart locks in a moment of need.

Hotels were a fortune so we stayed in a furnished apartment run by a rental company. This was a step above AirBNB; a brand new, fully managed and serviced building that caters to business travelers and long term rentals. You know the type: glass and steel, lavish but anonymous lobby, bright lights, inoffensive decor. It is populated by young businessy people…consultants of every shape and size. Kids were rare. Everyone was glued to their phones. But it was clean, convenient, and damn well perfect for our stay.

The one downside were the locks. The whole building was controlled by the LATCH app, a smart lock management system from your smartphone. To unlock any door in the building – front lobby, inner lobby, courtyard, elevator, suite, etc – you had to open the app, select that door from a long list, and hold it near a sensor. At times this was inconvenient and annoying, like when my mother in law went downstairs without her phone and I had to retriever her from the lobby, or when the elevator came and you had 15 seconds to find the tab for that specific elevator in the app before the door closed and you went for a ride to floor 9.

One night, however, my daughter and I returned from dinner to find a DC fire truck out front, lights blazing. Five burly firemen stood by the elevators, prying one of the doors open with a big crow bar. “Someone called us because they’re trapped in an elevator,” a firemen said. “We can’t unlock it. Can you use your phone or whatever to get us to the basement?”

So I pulled up the app, tried to hit the right tab on time, missed it, and me, my daughter, and five firemen holding axes and crowbars rode up ten useless floors while someone was stuck eleven floors below, with a smartphone connected to a smart lock that proved pretty dumb in that moment. Sometimes you need a crowbar as the innovative tool to get things unlocked.