on locks

Over time, if you’re fair-minded and balanced and also not affectedly critical, you’ll find that while there are certain things you dislike about your native country, there are other features that you find superior in your homeland.

One thing that America does seem to handle more logically than other countries is the question of locks.

What prompted this thought is that, while I was away today, the door to my master bedroom slammed shut. And now the door cannot be opened no matter how the key is turned. The lock is jammed. A carpenter will need to open this door, and I’m so busy tomorrow that I essentially won’t have access to that room until Wednesday.

In Europe too, locks are often just ridiculous. Sometimes you need to turn them at precisely the right angle while jiggling them sideways and vibrating the door lightly, or whatever. There are many stupid combinations of actions that are often necessary to enter a room. (I’m speaking here primarily of France and especially Germany, where I have had all sorts of lock problems in the past. I don’t recall any lock problems in the UK at the moment. But in Italy I did get locked into a bathroom for awhile once, a rather dumb situation.)

The other thing that strikes me as extremely stupid about many European locks is that it is often possible to lock yourself inside of a building, with no way to get out. I doubt that is even legal in the USA, and even the illegal cases are probably quite rare, simply because it would never occur to anyone to design a building in such a way.

There was one occasion in graduate school when I was visiting Germany over the Christmas holidays. My grad school roommate happened to be in Gießen visiting a female friend (an American) and she was nice enough to let me crash there on the couch one night too. She left early for her teaching job the next morning. A few hours later James and I exited her front door and closed it. We then walked down the building stairwell to the front door of that small apartment complex and discovered that we needed a key to get out of the building! And since we didn’t have a key to get back into her place (“just close it on your way out tomorrow and it will lock automatically”) we found ourselves locked in the stairwell. Seriously. This would surely be illegal in the USA, and rightly so. None of the 3 neighbors in the complex were home, as I recall. So James and I both had to squeeze through the porthole-sized window on the 2nd floor (that’s 1st floor in the European system) and jump down to the ground. Really, that’s just ridiculous, and a civilization as refined as that of continental Europe ought to be ashamed of such an illogical and unsafe system with locks.

If memory serves, right around half of the apartments I’ve rented in Europe at various times have had some sort of key-turning ritual that someone had to teach me, a kind of voodoo craft of angles and speeds. In America they’re just simple and foolproof, as they should be.

And by the way, why so many locks on doors internal to a single dwelling anyway? There are probably deep cultural reasons for this point, though, so I won’t push it as much as the other one.

Stars and stripes forever!

There are actually at least two other things I really like about the Anglo-Saxon countries collectively…

1. Safe drivers.

2. These countries are almost the only ones in the world where shopkeepers don’t “have a cow” about breaking larger bills. In Egypt, breaking large bills is at times difficult enough that it’s almost an art form to do your shopping in the right order for the size of bills you have. In a way I can understand that here, because something like the new 200-Pound note (around $35) is a lot of money for some of these shops. But again, in continental Europe (which of course I adore, so no hard feelings on these minor points), much of the time you have to put up with rolling eyes and loud exhalations if, for example, you pay for something that costs 6 Euros with a 20-Euro note. They act like this is some sort of major insensitive scam. It does vary by country a bit, but again, this is not a problem I ever have in the UK or Canada, and certainly not in the USA.

Then again, maybe we’re the freaks… Maybe there’s some sort of Anglo-Saxon cultural cryptotype that insists on banknote liquidity to an unnecessary degree. But it’s too late for me; I grew up that way, and I expect to be able to pay 6 Euros with a 20-Euro note without hearing a passive-aggressive sigh from the shopkeeper, damn it.