Darren’s Diatribe

We bought some locks years ago for all of our doors. I will call the manufacturer Lockwont to protect the guilty. We didn’t buy cheap ones so that we could be sure of getting a good product. Maybe that was our mistake.

We have had rather a lot of problems with these locks actually:

• Sometimes we can’t get the key in the locks¹
• Sometimes we can’t get the key out of the locks²
• Sometimes the locks will not unlock³
• Sometimes the locks will not lock³
• Some of the locks open the wrong way⁴
• Installing them requires four pairs of hands, or preferably a troupe of acrobats⁵

¹ A bit of silicone spray usually helps for a few weeks
² A key got stuck in one lock for over three months. We eventually found that if you press with a screwdriver on the brass bit right next to the key while pulling on the key with pliers, it will come out.
³ Hitting the lock very hard with the heel of a shoe a few times usually loosens things up a bit
⁴ Every lock I have ever come across opens the same way. Some of ours are the opposite way. I didn’t install them, but they look right to me.
⁵ Ideally the acrobats need lots of tools. You really need a few engineers to understand the instructions too. It would help to have a couple of sailors to help with the cursing.

It is actually quite hard to imagine a product with more faults. This isn’t exactly rocket science. People have been making locks which actually work for centuries. Until I had come across these, I had assumed a lock only had two functions; to lock and unlock. It never occurred to me that locks might grab hold of the key and not let go for months on end. Clearly this somewhat important requirement wasn’t in the design specification. Either that or the designer was high on crack and smoked the spec or something.

Recently we did some renovations, which required some more locks. Guess what we did:
1. We cursed the Lockwont people, refused to ever use their products again, and bought a different type of lock for the new doors.
2. We cursed the Lockwont people, their family and friends, their family’s friends, their friends’ families, their tennis partners and anyone who had ever met them, then bought new locks for all of the doors in the house and burnt the old ones.
3. SWMBO insisted that we bought matching locks with the vain hope that the Lockwont people had improved things in the last decade, found that they hadn’t, cursed the Lockwood people (and their entourage) many, many times, then wrote a ranting blog post about the whole sorry saga.

If you guessed 3, you are right

If someone tries to sell you a lock which looks like this, run away screaming:

In fact, punch them in the head first - hopefully that will discourage them from trying to sell these alleged “locks” to anyone else.

This scores Five Frowns