Office lockouts: what to do, and how to avoid the next one
A lockout at work is never just one person standing outside. Staff wait, customers leave, deliveries pile up. Here is how to deal with it and make it rare.
- Dispatch across Chicago's 77 community areas
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Usual causes
Keys left at home. A cylinder worn smooth after years on a busy door. A key snapped in the lock. A keypad code nobody wrote down. Salt and cold seizing a back-door lock in February.
Don't pry it
Commercial doors and frames are built to resist force. Prying one open usually costs more to repair than the lockout call itself.
What a commercial locksmith does
Opens the door with as little damage as possible, then fixes the cause: a new cylinder, a rekey, a repaired latch. If a key has gone for good, a rekey makes it useless. The commercial page covers master keys and panic bars.
Preventing the next one
Keep a signed key log. Leave a spare with a manager, not under the mat. Rekey whenever someone leaves with a key. Replace a sticky cylinder before it fails on a Saturday. Write the keypad code down somewhere safe.