Dodged a Bullet

The apartment I'm staying in has electronic locks. This seems like a good idea. You can carry one of the electronic keys or just use the keypad to unlock the door. It plays a happy little song for you and automatically relocks. How fantastic. The one serious design flaw is that there is no manual backup. Battery runs out, tough crap. (Actually, you can manually unlock it from the inside, so you don't have to worry about burning to death b/c you failed to replace the battery, but there isn't from the outside.)

The mover/shopper/apartment cleaner guy had me enter a new security code the first day and warned me that if the lock battery dies, they have to break the door and I'll have to pay for it. Fair enough. The batteries only have to be changed once or twice a year and I'm only going to be here for 3 weeks. Shouldn't be a problem. If the thing starts screeching, I'll know what to do.

Well, a few days back, I came home, and was greeted by a new song when I entered the code. I paused, thinking 'That's strange, why would anyone want to program the lock to have multiple songs? And why would it have decided to just up and changed today?' Since I didn't really understand why it played a song in the first place (or why the washing machine or any other number of appliances play songs), I didn't worry too much about it. I mean, it was just a different song, not some annoying or alarming sound that would obviously warn you to change the batteries or risk the permanent sealing of your apartment while your away.

As you may have guessed, lock battery alarm design is another area where Korea and I have some slightly different opinions. So this morning I woke up to find my lock would no longer play any song or unlock for me. Fortunately, I had some spare batteries. Even more fortunately, I was on the inside when it died.