New office ridiculousness

[jethrien]

Our office is permanently locked - when you step out of the elevator, you have to swipe a prox card to get into the office. Unfortunately, the bathrooms are not connected to our office - they're down the hall. So every time someone wants to use the restroom, they need to grab their id. Unfortunately, some people keep forgetting their ids, and borrowing mine.

Yesterday, we got an added bonus to this little joy - they installed locks on the bathrooms. So now to go to the bathroom, I need to grab my id and one of the bathroom keys, and unlock stuff to get both into the bathroom and back into the office.

WTF?

(For the record, this is not something anyone in my company asked for. The building apparently does this to all of the bathrooms. When one of the VPs asked the maintenance people why there were big holes in the doors - our locks were missing - they said, "Oh! You're supposed to have locks!" and installed them without actually asking us whether we wanted to have our precious toilet paper secured from intruders.)

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

That's funny--back in the World Trade, when I used to go in with my Dad on weekends, he'd only be able to let me into the men's room because the bathrooms were locked and coded such that you could only get into the one representing your gender of record. I got to see the little boys' room allllll the time, so it wasn't really that interesting when we were stupid little kids worrying about cooties and stuff.

But it is still a stupid practice. I could see doing it if the bathrooms were in your suite because then you could keep all those visitors from spreading germs and make interviewees feel all nervous about asking. Power trip.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

We do share the floor with another company, but still. I don't think some random guy is going to make it up to the 17th floor and try to kidnap me from the bathroom in the middle of the day.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

It's possible that this is the CYA principle in action: "We might get sued if someone is assaulted in a bathroom! Let's put locks on the bathrooms!"

It's also possible that, somewhere in the building and possibly on your floor, there's the restroom equivalent of Red-Bull-Paranoia-Boy, horrified that someone moved the toilet paper and insisting on locks to prevent such mischief.

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

Even for that, it's very dumb. If somebody gets assaulted in a bathroom, they'll probably scream. At which point, having the would be rescuers have to fumble for keys is probably quite counterproductive.