i now have in excess of $150 worth of keys on my keychain.

the physics building rekeyed its locks last week in an entirely astounding display of bureaucratic inefficiency.

to increase security, see, the doors were all changed to take only abloy keys -- thin rectangular prisms of aluminum that have teeth on all sides -- the idea, of course, being that they would be much more difficult to replicate.

however, with one key, i can now open all of the undergraduate labs and marking rooms, not to mention the machine shop and stores/receiving.

it lightens my keychain, to be sure, but all it takes is one key to get stolen for this shiny new 'security' to come crumbling down.

to deter carelessness, i guess, each key carries a $50 deposit. but i don't suspect that people who lose their keys deliberately go out to lose their keys, nor do i think that people who are likely to lose their keys are going to become any less likely to lose them just because each one is now worth $50.

anyway, i have three of these abloy babies. hence, $150 keychain. i'd better not lose these keys, i tell ya. $150 buys a lot of calamari.

as for the bureaucratic inefficiency that i'd mentioned earlier, getting new keys was remarkably painless for me, but not so for my friend AL and her labmates, who found themselves locked out of their lab for several days because the door was rekeyed before the keys to open the new lock were even available.

and parking and access control services required each member of the department to have a detailed form listing all of the keys they currently possess and the corresponding keys that would replace those. the administrator of the department spent more than 30 hours over a weekend just wading through the paperwork.

in the name of (questionable) security.

i'm not complaining, despite how it might seem. just observing, mostly.