Handed the Keys to the Kingdom

For a country with so few guns and so little crime, the people of Hong Kong sure are security conscious. For instance, I showed up at the office building and greeted a Security Guard stationed at the elevator bank. From there I rode a small lift up to the seventh floor of the Warwick which houses our Hong Kong offices. You wave your electronic pass at the small panel by the door and listen for the lock to pop free. This gets you into the technical center by passing through one of the conference rooms. In order to gain access to the general office area, you depress a switch alongside the door frame which frees up these locked doors.

For the moment you are all set. But, further safety precautions await your trip to the water closet. The offices do not have their own bathrooms. Instead, there are common restrooms on each floor of the building. In order to prevent unfettered access to the bathrooms, the back door leading out to the hallway is also locked, so be sure to bring your electronic pass along with your sports page when nature calls.

Of course, you can’t simply step into the washroom, no no no. They give you a separate, regular key that you’ll need to unlock the bathroom door. And, like pretty much everywhere else in the world, you can slide the stall’s deadbolt into place before you sit down. I’m pretty sure that the Secret Service hid Vice President Dick Cheney in a nearby handicapped stall back on 9/11.

Back in the States where the only prerequisite to obtaining a Firearm license seems to be a history of mental instability, we generally secure the premises with nothing more than stern looks. At my company, Simeb Inc., if a door isn’t open then its Christmas Day. And in this unlikely event, you can usually find a first floor office where the occupant inadvertantly left their window ajar.

Recently, I explained to a new woman receptionist about the emergency alarm located at the front desk. Sonia wasn’t even aware that the secret switch was there. Anyway, in the course of showing her how it worked, I ducked under the desk to discover that, lo and behold, it’s not even hooked up. I'm not the handiest guy around but when I emerged holding a fistful of wires, I was certain that they needed to be connected to something in order to quietly alert the police. With even this minimal system on the fritz, our receptionists couldn’t defend us with anything more than bad coffee and rude manners. So far, fortunately, that's been enough of a deterrent.