There are a number of reasons why your doors may lock. To prevent the guards from forgetting to lock after you all leave at night. They can also monitor who has access to the area at night - cleaning crew, security sweeps, repair people, etc. Also, your restrooms that you are using might be the same ones that guests to the building use and they don’t want the guests wandering into the cubicle farm. The guest pass may only work on certain doors too.
Also, if the doors are not locked why bother having to swipe a badge if the doors aren’t locking behind you? They might as well just leave them unlocked and wide open if that’s the case. Then they couldn’t monitor the doors for fire safety and theft reasons.
It’s not so extreme. It’s how most office buildings operated a very short time ago. I think we as a society are getting unnecessarily paranoid, trading negatives and not getting very many positives in return.
What’s the negative in your work example? That you have to carry a swipe card and take half a second to swipe it to unlock a door?
And the positives? Other posters have already done a fine job of pointing out the positive aspects of the situation. Keeping out unseedy folks is one.
I don’t think this situation qualifies as overly paranoid, and a cost-benefits analysis says (to me) that the positives outweigh the negatives. On behalf of those of us who swipe in just as you do, I’m sorry that it presents such a negative impact on your day.
I’m sure you’re just joking here, but threatening to contact someone’s employer over a message board post really isn’t cool. Stick with calling him a douchebag or a fuckhead or something.
Any guest who comes in has access to the cubicle farm and every other place on the floor. It’s only when they have to return from the restroom that they run into a barrier. How is this barrier preventing anything?
I’m not sure I understand the question. Yes, leaving the doors unlocked would eliminate the need for swiping. That’s the point.
Fire safety: If the doors didn’t lock, people wouldn’t prop them open.
Monitoring: I assume you’re suggesting remote monitoring of the doors. This doesn’t seem to be the case. Once someone props a door open, it usually stays propped open for hours.
For those of ya’ll who are ripping apart the OP, do you work in an office that (ab)uses badges for employees? Because, in my experience, he’s right. They’re a pain in the ass. Worth quitting over, no, but ripe for bitching about.
At my former workplace, we had 'em. Consider the following:
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One was issued per employee. No spares were given to management.
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Employees had to scan their badges to get in and out of the building, between different zones, and in and out of the break room.
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Employees were required to take their break in the break room, and not at their desk.
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If an employee didn’t have a working badge with them, their supervisor was required to come get them, but there was no plan for if their supervisor was away from their desk.
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Supervisors were required by upper management to be ‘managing by walking around’. Those sitting at their desk too much were warned.
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The badges broke all the time. They were flimsy, and the top bar that held them to their clothing was very close to the magnetic strip. Even a small crack would cause them not to work, which was like having no badge at all.
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A broken or lost badge took on the order of 3-6 weeks in some cases to get replaced and had to have written authorization from a supervisor and manager. The security guys simply wouldn’t respond to calls and were at their desk for a seemingly random 15 minutes per day in a completely different area of the building from the employees, supervisors, and everything else. Oh, and if an employee was fired or quit, there was no formal process for dealing with the badge deactivation.
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Employees late from break or lunch were docked pay and disciplined even if they were delayed by security for extended periods.
As a result of this, employees simply would borrow them from friends because it was impossible to manage a lost or broken badge. Supervisors, myself included, would horde badges from fired employees until they stopped working (I myself kept and used one for about eight months before I quit myself).
I’m sure security and badges and zone control and all that can be done in an intelligent manner. It can also be a gigantic pain-in-the-ass clusterfuck that damages employee morale and lowers productivity. YMMV.
How, exactly, do we decide what is and isn’t a reasonable concession to make in the name of security?
Define a short time ago. I’ve been swiping cards to access my floor (in addition to needing it to get into the building) for about a dozen years - certainly long before 9/11/2001.
[Edit]fluiddruid, I’ve thankfully avoided anything that bad, though I have been in some building set ups where one would have to swipe to go to the other side of the floor. As we were supposed to always have a badge displayed, it was usually clipped to my belt and wasn’t an issue of having to ‘remember’ it. The only time it was an annoyance was when carrying two-hands worth of stuff.
I don’t have survey statistics on the use of swipe cards, but we didn’t have to do it until nine months ago, and prior to that, in no multi-floor place that I worked required swipe cards on every floor. I never had an employee identification badge before 1997 and I didn’t have a magnetized one until 2004 or so.
A very good question, isn’t it? And one that doesn’t really seem to be part of a real public policy discussion. Why is that? Why is it that a nipple ring or breast milk story shoots up and ruins an individual’s day or week but we never see any comprehensive policy effort to figure out exactly what a security officer can demand and what an airport user should be able to expect in such a confrontation? And why don’t we see decisions by the T.S.A. on liquids and such put to rigorous review by independent oversight to determine whether they have any significant benefit and weigh them against inconvenience, pain, humiliation, etc., of passengers?
In case it wasn’t clear from my previous post, I support the OP’s statement that we’re getting security-happy, which is creating more negatives than it’s worth. You know what’s going to happen next time some terrorist group makes a dedicated effort to do something awful? They’ll succeed, and all the inconvenience and power-tripping in the world won’t have stopped it. The only real effect all these extra security measures are having is to keep people scared, and I’m fairly sure that that’s how The Powers That Be like us.
I’ve been using swipe cards since 1987. For the last two years or so, we’ve switched to proximity cards, which are definitely easier to use.
Ed
So, whichever date you take, the pervasiveness of swiping is relatively recent. And I have doubts that it’s affording us significant benefits, especially when implemented in the way that it is in my office.
I have to wonder how much of it might be due to legal liability. Maybe your employer is looking toward the day when a disgruntled ex-employee or pissed-off husband comes into the building and starts putting bullet holes into file cabinets and skulls. After the smoke clears will come the inevitable lawsuit against the building owner for “not doing everything possible to keep the employees safe.” Frankly, I see this as more of a paranoia of wrongful death lawsuits than sincere regard for the safety and well-being of employees. Either way I think it says something about things that have to be considered these days, as opposed to thirty or forty years ago.
Do you work for IBM? When I was there, we joked that we had the most secure restrooms on the planet because you could only get to them with a badge once you were on a secure floor behind a secure outside entrance. :rolleyes:
Well, let’s start with whether or not it’s useful. Forcing someone to remove a nipple ring is clearly not useful - I doubt it’s possible to hide dangerous materials inside a nipple ring.
The folks at my office building use one of my slippers to keep the back door open, so that they don’t have to use their keys to re-enter after their smoking breaks.
They could keep a key in the lock, or use a chair, or a door jam, or their own footwear, but for some reason they like to use one of my slippers.
I think it is a case of mistaken slipper identity, for they used to use one of the smoker’s slippers until it went walkabout.
No kidding. I’m required to carry my work ID and certification card with me all the time. They gave us a little plastic sleeve to keep them in, and a choice of a lanyard or the clip with the retractable cord.
The work ID doubles as a passcard to move around the corporate offices. Some places I can get into, and some I can’t. Yes, it’s to monitor our movements, but it’s also for security from outsiders. We have expensive medical equipment and drugs that people like to steal. Perfectly reasonable from a security standpoint.
When I’m on the road, I must have both on at all times. Not in my wallet in my purse or shoved in my pocket; they must be displayed on my person all the time.
It gets to be a pain sometimes, but you deal with it. Just today, I had a combative psych patient who kept trying to grab it. I stuck it inside my shirt, but once we arrived at the facility, I took it back out.
I work at a post-production facility in LA, so of course we have a million safeguards in place to protect our clients’ property. It’s never been explicitly said, but it seems much of it is in place just for our clients’ peace of mind and as a selling point of our company.
There are surveillance cameras everywhere. We need to scan our badges to get into the exterior of the building after traditional business hours, and at all times to get into the actual work floor. We sign NDAs upon hiring, and when we open new media, the proprietary software reminds us of this, and we need to click OK to dismiss the dialog box. (I personally click through this about 2 dozen times a day.) Passwords need to be relatively complex and changed every 90 days. There’s a security guard at the reception desk after 6pm until midnight or so. And of course, I have to wear a photo badge at all times, and confront and not let in anyone who doesn’t have a badge. I’m not even supposed to hold the secured door for my fellow cow-orkers, whether I recognize them or not.
But it isn’t a big deal, and I don’t know how the OP can call this a societal trend and say we’re all getting paranoid. I don’t know of any business that didn’t already have security in place suddenly adopting badges and weird entry/exit policies. Maybe we’re all swiping badges now because the technology is cheaper, easier to get, and it makes clients feel good. Perhaps the OP is just unaware of the reasons for the security measures, and how successful they’ve been.
I find it interesting that the OP immediately blames the security on fear of terrorism (an easily mocked reason), and not because of fear of liability or fear of theft (of either property or trade secrets), reasons much harder to dismiss out of hand.