At 42 I feel old and out of touch. Communicating with my customers is half of my job, and I’m constantly thinking I no longer understand the basic rules of electronic communication. My interactions leave me wondering if the entire ruleset has been rewritten, or if people simply don’t have manners anymore. I’m beginning to believe that it could be some of both, and that certain old politnesses just don’t apply anymore.

I have this notion that method of contact matters. In my mind–and it could be that that’s the only place where this idea resides–there’s a generally accepted hierarchy of urgency for the different ways you might contact someone. From least to most urgent, here they are:

• email – We send these with the understanding that the recipient might wait until he’s at his computer to answer. With the benefit of a keyboard and full-sized screen he can craft a well-considered response.

• texting – This demands a more prompt reply. It’s often written in shorthand and it pops up on our screens over whatever else we might have been looking at. There isn’t an expectation that a text would warrant a thorough well-written reply. The idea is that at the recipient’s first opportunity he should look at the message and send a short reply or acknowledgment of receipt. 

• calling – This requires the most immediacy. Talking is usually the most efficient communication method when you need to have an exchange that will involve some back and forth. A phone call is a request to have that back and forth right now.

Although this is my understanding, people do things that leave me questioning it all the time. 

They’ll call or text me at night or on a Sunday about the least urgent projects. Occasionally they’ll pretend they didn’t expect me to pick up the phone or answer the text at these hours, but they’re surely glad when I do. Who calls a business hoping not to reach someone?

Sometimes a property manager will send me an urgent work request by email, telling me a tenant is standing outside of his locked apartment and asking if I can help right away. Usually I see these emails hours after they were sent, as email is low on my priority list when I’m hustling from one job to the next. I ask why they didn’t call or text me, since it was urgent. What’s the difference, they say. The text message goes to your phone in your pocket and beeps. The email goes to your phone in your pocket and beeps. Check your phone when it beeps. 

Is that really the expectation? Am I supposed to check the device every time it beeps, chirps, or buzzes at me? It makes two hundred noises a day. How will I ever get through a task? 

And then customers contact me through WhatsApp. I downloaded that app to talk to old friends in other countries. Now it’s flooded with correspondence from customers. I didn’t see that coming. 

Other times people want to text me for a quote on a complicated project that requires a long volley of questions and answers. It will start with, “How much to change a lock?” This is like asking a mechanic, “How much to fix a car?” I’ve read that you’re supposed to respond to people’s queries using the same medium that they use to contact you. But I don’t want to play a complicated game of twenty questions over text message, stretched across a day and a half, when the same thing could be accomplished with a five-minute phone conversation. Am I expected to?

And what’s this with young people being afraid to make phone calls? I used to do after-hours lockout calls in a big modern apartment building downtown. Frequently the young resident and I needed to contact a friend or neighbor inside the building to give us access to their floor so we could get to the unit door that I was going to open. I always wanted to get them in and go home as quickly as possible, but the customer would pull out their phone and start typing a text. Not wishing to wait around while a text message went unnoticed, I’d suggest that they call instead and they usually seemed surprised, like it was a completely novel idea. 

My wife points out to me that half the phone calls we get these days are spam or outright scams. That wasn’t the case when I was young, so it’s likely that some of the changes are an adaptation to that. There are eight billion strangers in the world who can interrupt us at any moment to try to separate us from our money, and at almost no cost to themselves. This is a dramatic change from the days when long-distance sales calls were prohibitively expensive. 

I always expected that over time we would develop rules of etiquette around the new technologies that have emerged. I’m beginning to think that they already exist, but they bear little resemblance to the old ruleset. In many ways the very idea of having rules has gone away. The younger generations, which have grown up immersed in social media and cell phone culture, may innately understand something that I’m only just starting to grasp.

Maybe the new rules are built on an understanding that it’s not on us to police our own behavior when it comes to contacting each other. There’s so much noise coming from our phones that our main duty is to ourselves: we decide who we’re going to ignore, when we’re going to ignore them, and for how long. As long as we’re comfortable setting boundaries, we shouldn’t worry ourselves with what others are trying to do. If that’s the case, it seems a lot less kind than the old system, in which we tried to be courteous about when we reached out, and in turn we trusted each other’s judgment enough to be receptive when they did. But if that’s how it is, there’s no point in complaining. As a business owner, I just need to be clear about how and when people can reach me, and happy when they do.

I don’t exactly come out of this one smelling like roses.

Last week I had a day off and I agreed to bring a carless friend to the mall on the condition that she ride along with me for one quick job. As it sometimes goes, it turned into more than just one quick job. Halfway through it I was called by a petsitter who had locked herself out in the rain. She happened to be pretty close to the mall. I consulted with my friend and she agreed that we could squeeze in that second job before going shopping.

On the way to the petsitter lockout call, I got a text from someone whose elderly neighbor had fallen in the bathroom. They needed a locksmith to get into her house nicely rather than calling the fire department, which would surely break down the door. After getting permission to further delay our visit to the mall, I explained via text that I was en route to help someone out of the rain and that I could come right after. She said that was fine and sent me the address, which was also pretty close to where we were going.

I made quick work of the petsitter’s door and immediately called the next one to let her know I was ready to head over. She didn’t answer. I tried again. No joy. Since it wasn’t very far away, I drove to the person’s street and called the neighbor a couple more times. I looked around for activity like emergency responders or neighbors standing around looking concerned. The street was quiet. I tried the neighbor’s phone one more time to no avail, and then I drove away. Altogether this may have been a 20-minute detour. I apologized to my friend.

Ten minutes later I got a text: “Sorry I missed your calls. My phone was dead. We called another locksmith and he couldn’t get in. Could you come now?” Life is funny like that sometimes. Phone batteries die just when you think you don’t need to talk to a person and then recharge themselves when you realize you do. I understood what had happened. She wanted faster service than I was able to offer but also wanted to keep me thinking there was a job at hand in case it turned out she did need me. I was pretty unhappy about the deception and the resulting time waste. I told her that I was well on my way to another job on the other side of the county and that I wouldn’t be able to help.

In reality I was at the mall with my friend standing in line for overpriced cupcakes. Fancy cupcakes are usually more of a good-mood treat, and this episode had put me in a bad mood. I was so distracted by what had happened that I had trouble deciding what flavor of icing I wanted. And then, through my fog of bitterness, I remembered that this wasn’t just a story about a manipulative customer trying to hedge her bets with two locksmiths. At the center of it was an old person lying miserably on a bathroom floor. And to my knowledge, she was still there waiting for help. I had the ability to help but was declining to because I was mad at a neighbor for not answering my calls. This made me feel even worse. My friend saw that I was regretting this decision and encouraged me to go back and solve this problem while she shopped. But I thought it was too late to unwind my own lie about being on some other far-away job. So I stayed at the mall and helped her shop for socks. I was probably not very good company. Plus, I did not enjoy my cupcake.

Sadly, this story is representative of something I see in myself after over a decade of being a locksmith. When I first started this career I felt duty-bound to help anyone that called me, as if I were the only locksmith in King County. I loved rolling up to a house and saving the day. It barely mattered how far or how late it was. For the first few years I would usually sleep fully dressed and slumped in my chair until about 2 a.m., just in case I got a call. That way I could be out the door in moments.

It’s not like that anymore. Now I’m pretty busy for six days a week and I don’t want my evenings and days off interrupted with service calls. I try to get all the sleep I need before each day of work. Burnout is a real concern. I’ve been to thousands of lockout calls. The novelty of it wore off a long time ago and I can see that a bit of hardheartedness has crept into me. It makes me sad. And yet I think some degree of that might be necessary if I want a long career in this field. I have to draw lines and jealously guard my personal time. I can’t allow my work to be a round-the-clock commitment and crowd out everything else like it did in the early years.

Gone are the days when I could see myself as some kind of hero for hire. I frequently have trouble fitting in those emergency calls because my days are tightly scheduled with nonurgent work. I have become content with being a guy who offers a dependable service at a reasonable price, and who clocks out and unplugs when the shift whistle blows. It’s not as exciting as when I took on every emergency call that came my way, but it leaves room for other sources of fulfillment. I hope to use my personal time to enjoy my own life and build good relationships. Maybe someday when I’m old I’ll fall in my bathroom and there will be a neighbor whom I’ve had the time to get to know, and who will care enough to call a locksmith for me.

Some years ago I posted about replacing an old Schlage interconnected lock because the customer wanted a keypad on the door. I used a security wrap to cover the old door prep.

Today I did another one. In this case, the customer hated that the doorknob would just spin continuously when locked. This is a feature that confuses a lot of people. Over the years I’ve gotten a dozen or so calls about “broken” doorknobs that were simply Schlage’s G-Series interconnected locks working as intended. Two of these calls came from successive new owners of the same apartment, separated by about three years.

This time I replaced the old lock using push plates and a Don Jo CV2414 filler plate. This filler plate only comes in silver and my hardware was bronze, so I had to spraypaint it and then hit it with a layer of polyurethane for longevity. The filler plate is made to replace a different kind of lock and is 1/8″ too wide for the application. I used a razor blade and a chisel to carefully widen the mortise by 1/16″ on either side. I also had to make the mortise a little deeper in order for the plate to sit flush in the door. I used an ANSI strike to replace the old latchplate. It fit but left just a bit more play in the closed door than I’d have wanted. The locks I installed had a pretty traditional footprint and I used push plates that had lots of real estate above and below them in case the owners might someday want to install a keypad and handleset. If they do, the new hardware will hopefully sit neatly atop the push plates without overlapping the edges.

This project turned out nicely but it was custom work that required a lot of time and focus. I’m not sure I’d do it again.

There aren’t too many handlesets on the market that feature a deadbolt and locking grip. Baldwin makes some. They cost around $600 and may require professional installation, since a second nonstandard hole needs to be drilled. Sooner or later someone is going to want to put a keypad deadbolt on this door, and then the locking handleset won’t be desirable. To replace the Baldwin piece it will be necessary to patch or cover that hole. Since the door usually outlasts the hardware, my suggestion is always to favor hardware that uses a standard door prep. In other words, I don’t think you should buy this handleset.

Also, I rekeyed one of these today and getting to the cylinder entailed removing no fewer than eleven fasteners using four different tools. But that’s a me problem.

As we’ve all seen, it’s increasingly popular to replace traditional key-operated locks with electronic keypad locks. When doing so, it’s generally best to make the keyless lock the only piece of locking hardware on the door. Otherwise it is almost inevitable that at some point the other hardware will get locked and someone who does not expect to need a key will be locked out. A challenge arises when a customer wants to have keyless entry on a door that has a mortise lock.

This is not usually a simple lock swap. As it stands, the keyless options for mortise locks are mostly aimed at commercial users. They lack the affordability and user friendliness of the locks commonly offered for residential applications, and they’re not front-door pretty. But the residential keypad locks we get from the big retailers require a door preparation that is completely different from that of mortise locks. Replacing an expensive and sometimes very old mortise lock with a tubular lock entails covering or filling old holes in the door and making new ones. There are different ways of doing this, which range from labor-intensive to unattractive. It’s tempting to leave the mortise lock as it is and just add a residential keyless deadbolt higher on the door, but mortise locks are notorious for causing lockouts even when people are accustomed to using keys, so this is not a good solution.

The least hardware- and labor-intensive solution (read: quickest and cheapest) is often to modify the existing mortise lock so that it only functions as a passage handle, and then install the new keypad deadbolt above it. That’s what I did to the door in the accompanying photo. It is a commercial-style door that the customer wanted to use a specific residential keypad on.  I opened up the mortise lock body, which looks like a steampunk Rube Goldberg project inside, and plucked out a bunch of the parts that make it lock. The faceplate was left with two empty spaces where locking elements used to be, and the keyed cylinder is no longer functional. For a more finished look we could have replaced the faceplate with one that didn’t have those holes and replaced the cylinder with a dummy, but the customer deemed it unnecessary.

It’s possible that this post will be a curious internet fossil within a couple of years, as lock manufacturers are rapidly putting out new products to meet the growing demand for keyless entry. Until then, my advice, when practical, will be to leave your beautiful front door as it is and put the keypad lock on the mudroom door, which rarely has a mortise lock on it.

A great deal of my time as a locksmith is spent rekeying people’s locks so that existing keys will no longer allow access to their homes and businesses. Usually when moving into a new space it’s wise to rekey all the locks. Sometimes we take that measure but later lose faith in someone that we ourselves have given a key to. Here are a few situations I’ve encountered where rekeying was clearly the right course of action:

-A landlord called me up requesting an urgent rekey of his rental property on Mercer Island. His tenant had been taking a nap on her sofa when an unfamiliar young man walked in, announcing to the house that he was home. He had been backpacking in Europe and while he was gone his family moved without telling him. His key still worked, though.

-A woman in Newcastle left her dog in the care of a female house sitter while she went on vacation. She had cameras set up in her house so she could watch her dog throughout the workday, and the house sitter turned them to face the walls. She reasoned that someone staying in a hotel room wouldn’t want to be subject to video monitoring, and so she shrugged it off. What she did not shrug off was when she came home a day early and walked through her master bedroom only to find an unknown man taking a bubble bath in her tub. The married house sitter had been using the gig as an opportunity to meet with a paramour, and left him in the house while she went to work.

-A widow in North Seattle came home from the grocery store and found her next-door neighbor standing in her bedroom. When she asked him what he was doing and how he got in, he explained that he still had the key from when the previous owner lived there, and that he’d come in because he was “just curious.” In addition to this being outrageously inappropriate, it was also rather unfortunate because the woman had been good friends with him and his wife, and this incident would be hard to get past.

I don’t even like it when unexpected visitors knock on my front door, so I can’t imagine how unhappy I would be if I found one on the other side of that sacred barrier. Thinking back on these incidents, I almost want to rekey my own house just for good measure.

One of my pet peeves is when customers use the word mechanism. I’ve only ever heard it over the phone and in the following context:

Me: What’s wrong with your lock?

Customer: There’s a problem with the mechanism.

Not only is this word only ever used with me in this way, but it’s also only ever used by male customers. And it’s only ever spoken with an unironic air of confidence and expertise. In case you’re not aware, the word mechanism, in this context, is a highfalutin synonym of whatchamajigger. It’s completely meaningless and it does not convey a single iota of knowledge or understanding about locks and how they work.

It occurred to me recently that I hadn’t heard the word in a long time. I started wondering why that was. Did this have something to do with shifting trends in the lexicography of male overconfidence? I pondered this for a while. It wasn’t until after a phone call with a customer that I realized what it was. Instead of asking:

What’s wrong with your lock?

I instead asked:

What’s your lock doing?

I don’t remember if it was a conscious decision to stop asking the first question and start asking the second, but the subtle change has benefitted me and my customers. The first question was an unreasonable one, which demanded too much of the customer. It asked for diagnosis. It’s my job to provide that, not the customer’s. The other question asks for symptoms. That doesn’t require any kind reasoning or hypothesizing about why the lock is malfunctioning. Indeed, the question discourages the kind of unsupported diagnostic description that might set me down the wrong path in my effort to visualize the problem.

So all along it was my bad wording of the question that was inviting a response that annoyed me so much. I’m glad that I, consciously or not, corrected that. As I continue to run my little business there’s a constant drift toward greater efficiency, both in how I perform the physical work and in how I communicate with my customers. Next I have to figure out a way to get my customers to stop telling me about their tumblers. I never have managed to figure out what those are. I suppose they may be a part of the mechanism.

I received an interesting call from a customer in Bothell. She told me that her neighbor had entrusted her with the task of watering his house plants when he went for an extended trip to his home in India. But there was something wrong with the lock because the key he gave her wasn’t working right. It broke off in the lock when she tried to use it. Now she couldn’t get in and the plants were in peril. Could I let her into the house?

“It sounds like you didn’t have the key for your neighbor’s house,” I told her.

“No, no,” she assured me. “It was his house key. He gave it to me.”

“Did you ever successfully use the key to get in?”

“Well…no. But it was my neighbor’s house key. I’m sure of it.”

Realizing that this discussion was not going to be productive, I explained the steps she would have to take. This is a discussion that I’ve had with countless housesitters and petsitters in the past. Because it’s not your house, I can’t just let you into It, I told her. I would need to feel very secure that the owner of the house has given approval to let me let you into the house. What I’d like to see is a photo of your neighbor holding his ID, along with a note from the same source giving me permission to gain entry to the house. I would then check the neighbor’s name against public records. Once I had all of that I could do this job.

“Okay, but it’s middle of the night in India. I don’t want to wake him up.”

“This will have to wait until tomorrow, then.“

“What if I just show you my ID and prove that I’m the neighbor? Then will you let me in?”

I explained why that would not be sufficient. I reiterated my request for the owner to send a picture of himself holding his license. In reality, I believed her. It would be very audacious to hire a locksmith to help her commit a burglary. But I enjoy my livelihood and my freedom, so I’m not leaving any room for doubt, and especially not over some house plants. So I left her to decide whether she wanted to meet my conditions are start looking for a less punctilious locksmith.

The next morning I awoke to an email in my inbox. It contained the note I had asked for and two photos. One was of a driver’s license bearing the address in question, and the other was of the subject of that ID. If you’ve been reading carefully, you already know that this is not quite what I asked for; the owner and ID were not in the same photo. What’s more, the name on the ID was not the same as the name in the email address. I looked closely at the owner’s photo and noticed that the home the person was standing in looked very much like one of the newer houses that I frequently visit in Bothell. So I checked the photo’s metadata, and sure enough, it had been taken three months prior. This raised more concerns than it settled. It’s like if I’d asked someone from a dating app to send me a picture of herself holding up three fingers to make sure she wasn’t catfishing me, and she sent me a photo of herself in front of Epcot holding up the peace sign.

It didn’t work for me, so I had to get back to the neighbor with the bad news. She didn’t take it well.

“Aw, come on,” she cajoled. “I gave you almost everything you asked for. Can’t you just make an exception for me?”

“I’m sorry. No. It looks like we’ll just have to wait another day to get the right documents from your neighbor.”

“Listen,” she said. “It’s very important that I get into that house. My neighbor has trusted me to take care of his plants. And inside he has a HOLY BASIL. This is an extremely important plant in our religion and it is very delicate. I must water it.”

Now, I’ve let people into houses in a hurry for all kinds of reasons. Once a lady was trying to get to a job interview on time. One time a young woman desperately needed to get to her medication. More than once a locked door has separated a caregiver from a small child. But this horticultural emergency is the strangest and least compelling reason I have heard to break protocol and risk helping a stranger commit a crime. As desperate as this customer was, and as much as I like playing the hero, the holy basil didn’t move me.

So we waited another day for the owner to send what I asked for. In the end I opened the door, confirmed that the broken-off key had nothing to do with the lock that it was lodged in, and made a working key. I assume the basil was fine.

As an epilogue to this story, I should say that later in the same day I was in the home of another Indian customer, recounting this story with some curiosity as I worked on her lock. She went off into another room and came back with a leaf, which she handed to me. It was, indeed, the leaf of a holy basil plant. I wasn’t sure if I should put it in my mouth, but she encouraged me to try it. I would say that it tasted like a cross between mint, basil, and clove. She confirmed that it serves an important religious function and explained to me that it is a very delicate plant that is hard to grow in this climate, and that it is particularly sensitive to overwatering.

A couple of weeks ago I was scheduled to help with an eviction. The job was indefinitely postponed because earlier in the week a Sheriff’s deputy sustained a serious gunshot wound while executing an eviction in Ballard. The resident died by her own hand in that incident.

Evictions are among my least favorite parts of this job. It often starts with me crouching at a door with a cluster of policemen standing behind me waiting for me to quietly pick the lock. The pressure of this does not make me a more efficient lockpicker. And these days, as I fumble with the lock, it’s almost inevitable that someone behind me will mention The Lockpicking Lawyer, that talented YouTube star whose hobby lockpicking videos make me look like a silly amateur. On one occasion I spent about ten nervous minutes picking a lock and as soon as I got it open and turned around to face the waiting officers I heard the deadbolt snap shut behind me; the resident inside had been standing on the other side of the door.

In most cases, once I get the door open, I’m politely brushed to the side as the police stream into the house. As soon as it’s considered safe for me enter, I have to go in and secure the house. Sometimes the evictees are miserably gathering up their most treasured possessions before everything is removed from the house. I’ve never been into a well-kept eviction home. They usually smell nauseating. They’re always in shambles. Once I had to wade through a room that was piled chest-high with empty beer cans. There’s often a carpeted room that the residents have been letting their dogs deposit their waste in. Sometimes the human residents have used the carpet for the same purpose to spite the landlord.

A few years ago I had to do an eviction around the time of all the Defund-the-Police protests. This was a second attempt at evicting a resident who’d recently experienced a parade of devastating setbacks. On the first eviction attempt he had flashed a gun and the operation was terminated. So on this attempt the eviction team congregated several blocks away at a public park. I would estimate that there were no fewer than thirty law enforcement officers there from various departments, including SWAT. The guy leading the operation gathered everyone into a circle and told them what to expect. One thing I remember clearly was him exhorting them to exercise restraint if the resident had to be subdued; he didn’t want any more officers than necessary to get involved if a physical altercation transpired. It was only a month after the murder of George Floyd and he was afraid of cell phone footage appearing on YouTube showing a down-and-out tenant at the bottom of an unholy dogpile of Seattle policemen.

I, along with the other civilians present, were told to wait there in the park until the property was cleared, and then they all got in their vehicles and the entire caravan snaked out of the parking lot and down the road to ascend upon the house. By the time I got there, the house had been swept for residents and explosives and there was no longer a door frame to hold the door shut. I did what I could to install a padlock and hasp on the door as the team of junk removers carted furniture and household items through the door I was working on. I was in their way and they in mine. The padlock didn’t prevent the resident from re-entering that same night, but it did serve its other intended purpose, which was to necessitate that the evicted resident forcibly breach a locked door to get in.

So as I was saying, I don’t like doing evictions. They’re stressful and the houses are usually gross. And they always represent a terrible moment in the life of the tenant, which I’m somehow contributing to. This is not to say that landlords aren’t entitled to—often financially dependent upon—the rent that they’re owed. But gosh if I don’t prefer to be changing the locks for a happy young couple who have just gotten the keys to their first home.