security

I must have posted some time ago about the circus of getting the little electronic passes set up to control who comes through the lab doors.
What I haven't been letting you in on is all the fun of moving half the lab into some recently vacated space in the main building. It's been quite a hassle, and certainly contributed to the ambient stress. My part of the lab was pretty much at a standstill for the month of February because of the move, but it's over now. Or nearly.
One thing required of us is to restrict access to our spaces to authorized persons only. So we added electronic locks to the main lab last year, and little chips to our ID tags to let us in. The new space was already equipped with the kind of lock you punch a code to open. Well, once you give the code to someone, you can't take it back. And we have a fair number of temporary personnel, plus even if we didn't, a code can just get spread around totally out of your control with just one leak. Then you have to change the code, which is a huge pain in the ass because there are a lot of people who -do- get to know the code, and they don't all come around every day, and so some bright thing will just stick it on a post-it next to the door...
No, we will have our little chip system, please.
Only, there's only one person in the hospital who can program the little controller thing, and the controller wouldn't hold a charge, and there's no electrical outlet anywhere near the door, and it was vacation time, and...
Four weeks, we just blocked the door open with a bit of plastic.
And now it has come to light that all the difficulty with the controller was just a lack of information on how to use the thing properly.
So now it works.
!huzzah!
That's one of the doors.
There's another door, not equipped with anything more than a handle and a key-operated lock that nobody has the key to. We're supposed to not use that door at all, and in fact they're supposed to come and make it unusable. In the meantime, instead of being permanently locked, it's permanently open.