Eden’s Not So Hot

About a month ago Pim and I moved into a lovely new apartment building that’s optimistically called “Eden”. To be fair, it seems to be quite well thought out and built, but there are still some funnies.

Eden has some clever security features, basically centred around $100 cards of some intelligent variety. You have to beep a little box to enter the front door, and another to drive into the building’s underground carpark. You also have to beep a little box in order to use the lift, although you can in fact go to street level without. If you live on level 8, your card only allows you to catch the lift to level 8 – rather clever, but potentially quite annoying, and certainly anti-social.

Of course the building also has fire stairs, so yesterday I asked management if it was possible to use the stairs at just any old time. I fairly expected to be told no, since this would be a fairly serious dilution of the card-based security. Just anyone could wait for a resident to enter or leave the building, and then go to any floor at will. I mean, it wouldn’t be allowed, would it.

Of course it would. Silly fools, now we have yet another secure environment where the security does diddly-squat to keep us safe, but does make life more difficult for everyone by forcing them to carry around expensive and inconvenient bleepy-cards. Pure genius.

Posted Sunday, November 27, 2005

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