The Panopti-Con

There.  Done.  

The last of the stuff we had squirreled away in the storage facility during the house moving process was cleared out of the unit today.  Yeah, sure, all the actual “house” stuff was moved a long time ago but in order to eke out a little more wiggle room in the garage I needed to keep a pressure washer, a chainsaw, a push mower, and a tiller in there until my wife’s folks could come and get them.

You may recall that I once referred to this place as “The Least Secure Storage Facility in the Whole Wide World”.  Now that the last of my stuff has been moved out, I guess there is no harm in telling you why the place is only marginally better than unloading your U-Haul full of stuff beneath the nearest freeway overpass and asking the hobos living there to “just keep an eye on it for a few months”.

About 10 years ago the wife and I used this facility to keep our junk in after Hurricane Isabel twisted and bent our home into an exciting and interesting new shape.  A decade later, here we were again looking to store our meager possessions while we were in-between homes. 

I wasn’t surprised to see that we were still in their files even after so long a period - nothing electronic really ever dies, after all.  As a matter of fact, I was pleased that we really didn’t need to go through much of the paperwork associated with storage facility rental.  Tiny and easily-ignorable red flags pathetically tried to get my attention after we were told that our original 4-digit code was still valid, but to no avail.

One day I fat-fingered my code in and, lacking options, pressed the star key anyway, fully expecting the gate to just sit there while the keypad beeped at me. Instead, the gate rumbled and squeaked open as usual.  What luck!  Time to buy lottery tickets!

Right?

Umm... no.  Remember, our code was still valid after being a non-customer for 10 years.  I can only assume that is also true for every other customer over the past ten years...

Let’s say to keep in business 200 units are taken at all times. Let’s also say that people use the facility for two months on average.  Finally, let’s assume that everyone chooses a 4-digit code randomly and everyone’s code stays valid forever.  That gives (roughly) a 70% chance that any 4-digit number would open the gate.

Bad, but it gets worse.

Over the course of the house move I needed to transfer stuff with my truck a few dozen times.  I tested my “70%” theory by just putting in any old numbers I felt like when entering and exiting the “secure” area.  After about the sixth time coming and going and never once being rejected (a 1% probability, btw), I got the feeling that 70% was way, way low.

For fun I punched in three numbers, then the star.  Open Sesame!  How about two digits then the star?  Yep, the gate opens.  Surely not one digit, though... Sure enough, it did.  How about eight digits?  You betcha!  Only when I only pressed the star key preceded by absolutely no digits did the gate just sit there.  

So, the intimidating, barbed, chain-link gate is less an “obstruction to theft” and more along the lines of “urban post-modern kinetic sculpture ”. Nice...

Bad, but it gets worse.

One of the units we rented was a 10-foot by 10-foot enclosure with a dead-bolt type lock on the front that fit a padlock.  Once the latch was slid and the padlock was in place the corrugated steel door could not be lifted.  At least, that’s the theory.  

One time when shutting the unit I discovered the door wobbled by about 3/4 of an inch in its tracks.  After I clicked the padlock home I glanced around the security-camera-less facility to make sure I was alone and shifted the door a little and tried to lift it.  No problem.  Even with the lock in place the door easily slid upwards about five feet until the lock impacted the roof of the unit.  I closed everything up and gave this some thought.

What to do...  what to do...

Obviously, I was not going to blog about it right away.  Reporting the matter to the probably unscrupulous and clearly not-detail-oriented owners seemed risky.  Moving all the stuff to another place would require at least a dozen more trips I had neither the time nor the energy for.  The stuff was insured, there were no real irreplaceable things in there, and all the “high” ticket items were all the way in the back of this very densely packed unit, anyway.  Furthermore, this unit was smack in the middle of an aisle of completely identical ones and 200 others just like it populated the whole place.

As I get older I am dismayed to discover that the solution to a shocking number of life’s problems is to simply “do nothing”.  It’s just never been my style, you see.  But, fine, let’s play “Purloined Letter” and hide all my junk in plain sight and see how it goes...

It went fine.  I wonder, though, if I shouldn’t go back there and at least try to get my seven bucks back for the padlock we bought from the owners...