Ehh, I’ve locked myself out twice in 25 years. Once I called a locksmith, the other time I just broke in myself. I’m not that worried about it.
We had our car broken into a while back, and one of the things taken was a house key in the console. So I was going to call a locksmith to have all the locks re-keyed, but I discovered thst it’s cheaper to just buy new locks and install them.
The latest Weiser locks I bought have the ability to be re-keyed. So I ought four locksets, and keyed them all to use the two keys from one of the sets. The total cost was about $150, plus about an hour of my labor (changing locksets is trivially easy). And now we have new locksets on the doors instead of 20 year old ones.
Also, if this ever hapoens again I can just re-key them all with two keys from one of the other sets.
The winner. I had to learn how to defeat the standard locks used by the State Department as part of my job: everything from padlocks to safe dial locks (electronic locks weren’t in use yet). The master locksmith teaching us said that picking locks was a waste of time (for us). Drilling works the best, unless there are those god-cursed ball bearings in the way, in which case brute force may come into play. For padlocks, leverage defeats most of them and there is a tool for that. Or you can just use open-end wrenches on the cheaper ones.
One of my less than brilliant young airmen once flubbed the dub on resetting the combo to a DOD GSA standard SECRET level filing cabinet / safe. Which they discovered by changing the combo as was periodically required, then locking the safe closed, then trying to use their new combo. Rather than the right way which is reset the combo, lock the safe’s lock with the drawer open then test the new combo. If the door is already open it’s easy to set/reset combos from the lock’s back side. If the door is closed, it’s … much harder. Oops.
I was in the office when the locksmith showed up. Big drill motor, big expen$ive drill bits plural, a mechanism to sorta clamp it to the safe as a de facto drill press to hold continuous pressure on the bit, and an amazing amount of noise. A long time later it was open and the lock (and perhaps safe) was junk.
Your tax dollars at work.
Ditto. I installed fairly low-tech combination deadbolts about 15 years ago and still can’t get over how convenient they are. They relock themselves after 30 seconds so I didn’t have to worry that my teens would forget to lock the door when they left for school in the morning after I’d already left for work.
I also have a backup key in a locked real-estate key lockbox hidden in the backyard. I’m sure it’s not too difficult to break into, but my house isn’t even remotely a burglar target.
I live alone and after twice locking myself out and having to break in, I went with a key lockbox. Has a mechanical combination lock. I’ve had to use it a couple of times and knowing it’s there makes life easier. It’s bolted to a deck joist in the rear of the house and it’s not easily seen.
Years before I found out about the Lock Picking Lawyer, I knew someone who used to be a locksmith who told me he used to show his friends how useless the deadbolts on their front doors actually were if someone wanted to get in by demonstrating opening the lock in seconds with a simple rake.
Visually seeing it being done by the Lock Picking Lawyer really is both depressing and amazing.
It’s only depressing if you don’t realize how rare the necessary skills are. Most thieves are not capable of lockpicking.
Most thieves may not care about doing a little damage and snapping the lock or smashing your window, either.
As far as unverified anecdotes, a friend of a friend supposedly locked herself out of her apartment someplace in San Francisco, and, as she stood there for a moment trying to figure out what to do, a sketchy-looking dude walking by noticed and said, oh, did you get locked out, and offered to help: he had her door picked open inside of two minutes 
Lockpicking is the polite way to break and enter.
Politeness is not a highly esteemed quality in common criminals.
If you want to stop criminals a big lock on the front door just sends them around to the back door and windows not seen from the street. Dogs work better than locks. You don’t need to your house to be totally protected from break ins, it just needs more deterrents than your neighbor’s house.
That’s the point though, a rake requires virtually no skill and works on a depressingly large number of locks. This is how simple it is to use a wave rake:
One constantly needs to keep one’s skills sharp, but for work I am sure your gentleman burglar carries (among other things) one of these:
This made me chortle. We were occasionally called on to open safes that had been placed in storage with the combo drawer closed and nobody still there who had any idea what the combo used to be. Normally, you set it for 50-0 for an empty safe. You can either drill with said drill rig for the combo or for the reset, but it takes a lot of practice to get it right, and those hardened steel protective plates are a real bitch. I usually just drilled “up the middle”, which destroys the lock and usually the drawer it’s attached to.
Raking a common padlock is so easy that I don’t bother keeping track of the keys to unlock my air compressor (chained to a post), my shed door, or even the cable I use to secure the spare tire under the rear of my SUV. I just grab a rake and a tension wrench and pop the lock open. It usually takes no more than 10 seconds.
This is also true of the locks on my (older) Thule roof rack. You can buy replacement keys on eBay, but it’s cheaper and faster to rake them.
I agree with malicious. Deaf? I have profound hearing loss and have taken steps to deal with that. My phone is always on me and set to vibrate. In fact, there are many workarounds for the deaf community (doorbells that flash lights, etc).
Stoned? I’m often under the effects of cannabis and would point out that stoned and stupid aren’t synonyms. Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong are/were comedians.
Cheers!
We went through similar logic after deciding to “armor-up” our house. There’s always another step a determined invader can employ, but each step up that ladder moves to lower probabilities and increased time invested. So (imo) the key is finding a level which defeats the vast majority of your threats.
So we hardened doors and windows to the point they’re stronger than the adjoining walls, and stopped there. Even in the unlikely case that bad guys employed enough power tools to get through the brick, it’s plenty of time for us to prepare or flee.
Another approach is misdirection. The realtor’s box on a back door, or a key lockbox, both with keys that operate nothing. The decorative faux-stained glass on the front door which is actually strong plexiglass. Or non-standard, non-intuitive locking mechanisms, which the bad guys can’t figure out without investing additional time. Our overall goal is making it as confusing, slow, noisy, and frustrating as possible. All while beneath multiple cameras and bright lighting.
For those who find Lock-picking Lawyer interesting, may I suggest Deviant Ollam’s videos. He’s an actual pen(etration)-tester who shows a variety of clever ways to enter locked buildings. His “Breaking into a bank with a glass of whiskey” is a classic. Warning: he’s a little full of himself, and a lot of the videos are opinions on airlines and booze. But there’s plenty of wheat in his chaff if you care to rummage through it. “I’ll Let Myself In” is pretty good too.
Yeah.
Lock, etc., only keep honest people out. For widely varying values of “lock” and “honest-enough”.
I love watching the Lock Picking Lawyer use a rake. It takes him about 3 seconds of rapidly sliding it back and forth. But I can see he is also jiggling it up and down with a waggling motion of his hand. Obviously years of training has given him “the feel”. I need to buy a beginner’s set of tools to try my hand at it.
I get absolutely pissed when I’m outside on a run or something and a family member locks the door and I’m stuck without a key.
My solution was to hide a key is a secret place on the north west corner of the house tucked into the siding behind the air conditioner unit, about 2 feet from the ground. I keep it in a little rubber pouch fashioned from a bike inner tube…no one will ever find it.