Locked out - A year of sleepless nights
Episode 7 of Surreal Stories from the Hidden World of Hotels
When I left what had become Radisson Hotel Group after 31 years, I had more seniority than the average age of a hotel employee. Or at least that’s what the people who loved to say “OK, Boomer” to all my brilliant suggestions liked to tell me.
Over the years, we made a lot of mistakes in the name of progress. This is the one that cost me the most amount of sleep.
We installed the world’s first online lock system in our 491-room hotel in 1989/90. Don’t get me wrong, it was a brilliant system, with functionality many systems still don’t have today.
It didn’t only keep an audit trail of when a card was used to unlock the door, it recorded and stored information on when the door was opened from the inside.
During the year or so the system was in use, that feature alone helped us solve many “thefts”, when guests would complain to the front desk that "housekeeping” had stolen valuables from their room.
An audit of the lock would invariably show that the guest’s card was used to open the door sometime after midnight. An hour or so later, the audit said the door was opened from the inside. In the morning, the audit showed the door was opened from the inside again, shortly before the guest arrived at the front desk with their allegation of theft by a room attendant.
We would show the guest the readout from the lock and suggest that before we interrogated our housekeeping staff, we would appreciate it if they could contact the person who had visited them in their room.
“Perhaps your guest mistakenly took your Rolex and your wallet?”, we suggested.
The guests’ demeanour would swiftly shift from angry allegations to blushing nervousness. “Please don’t let my wife find out!”, they would plead. Our lips were sealed and the cases were closed.
We had so many visions and plans for the brilliant system. It could be integrated into the fire alarm system and be used to allow doors to be opened remotely so emergency services didn’t need to destroy them to gain entry. It could track which occupied rooms hadn’t been opened from the inside and indicate where there may be sleeping guests during an evacuation. It could be linked to property management and building control systems for more efficient use of energy.
The possibilities were endless.
Unfortunately, the system didn’t work.
At least it didn’t work in a 491-room hotel if we surpassed 55% occupancy. That happened on average 6 days per week. 7 in high season. Even at lower occupancies, the system would crash if we tried to integrate it into common doors like the fitness centre, meeting rooms, or use it for elevator access.
Guest complaints come thick and fast in a large high-rise hotel when nobody can open the door to their room. Sometimes, even when it seemed like the system was working, delays in the network that connected the locks to the property management system meant that a card could programmed to provide access to a specific room, but the guest would arrive at the room before the information from the system did. Sometimes, the guest would arrive a full 10-15 minutes before the system sent the information to the lock so it knew the guest’s card was valid.
I should probably remind readers who weren’t around when the dinosaurs went extinct, (except me, of course, I’m still here), that this all took place in the early days of network technology.
Connecting over 500 doors and a multitude of other things in our prestigious property involved a lot of wires. The word wireless had been invented but was only used by Englishmen who, funnily enough, used it when talking about a radio. (Funny lot, those Englishmen, they have a language named after them and they thought wireless meant radio… I wonder what they think wifi is?)
In those dinosaur days, networks were connected by wires.
Yes, wires went to every single door in the hotel. A hole was drilled through the frame and the back of the door so the wires could be connected to the lock. It was a huge battle to get this done and ensure the doors kept their 30-minute fire safety rating.
Fortunately, that wasn’t my problem. Unfortunately, the people whose problem it was solved it so we could proceed.
That became my problem because, as those of you who have been paying attention already know, the system didn’t work.
First, there was the problem of short-circuiting. Our fancy new locks couldn’t cope with any amount of static electricity. With lush carpets covering every hallway and many guests stylishly favouring silk, wool, polyester, rayon, or, (remember it was in prehistoric times shortly after we emerged from our caves), even fur, there was an abundance of static electricity that kept security guards in shape running from room to room resetting the short-circuited locks.
We solved that problem by paying a company that could miraculously remove static electricity by spraying our carpets with a magic potion. After spending an arm and a leg on their services, one of our employees noticed one of their employees adding a few drops of fabric softener to a bucket of water. It was then filled into containers on their Ghostbusters uniforms which they wore while they walked around spraying the magic potion on our carpets.
We terminated the contract and our cleaning attendants sprayed the fabric softener on the carpets thereafter.
I think some of them had hoped they would get to wear Ghostbusters uniforms.
Alas, that was not the case.
Teething problems were expected with a new system. We were patient and the company that installed it had a technician who was even better. Great with guests. Great with us. He worked tirelessly.
We stripped down our use of the system so it was left with one function. Open the right guest room doors for the right guest in a timely manner. Forget all the fancy stuff it could be integrated into. We could get to that later… or so we thought.
(We did keep the “door opened from inside” function though. It was too much fun to throw out.)
Problems we hadn’t noticed were queuing up like Swifties at a Kansas City Chiefs football game.
The system was designed for credit cards to be used as room keys. If you think it was hard to convince fire safety authorities that our doors maintained a sufficient fire rating after holes were drilled through them, try convincing credit card companies that locks would only read some of the information on their cards and solely use it as a unique identifier the lock would recognize and, if valid, unlock the door.
And, if you think that is hard, try convincing a guest that nothing bad will happen when the front desk agent says, “I’m just going to swipe your card through this fancy machine and then you can use it as your room key.”
Guests aren’t stupid. They figured every time they inserted their card somewhere it cost them money. There was no way they were going to insert their card into a door lock twenty times a day…
“Don’t worry,” the front desk agents would say, “this is all safe and approved by the credit card companies.”
“Yeah, they’re the ones that take my money every month.”, the guest would say and ask for one of the hotel’s plastic cards instead.
The programmers had counted on guests using credit cards so they only had the system count to 1000 before it started renumbering cards.
Do the math.
Less than every third day, a card would be rendered obsolete because a new card would be programmed for a different door, but with the same card number.
Up until business started booming, I was sleeping fairly well.
After occupancy rose to over 60% a night, every night, I would get a call sometime between 0300 and 0500. (That’s the middle of the night for people like me who aren’t former military personnel. Come to think of it, it might be the middle of the night for them too.)
I was the only person that had a password capable of resetting the entire system. Fortunately, I lived about 20 minutes walk from the hotel and we could usually get the system up and running before most people woke up. (Full disclosure, I did sometimes share my password and walk the night security officer through the complicated procedure… Sorry, IT people)
Over time, I became very good friends with a person in Dallas, Texas. He was the system programmer. I vividly remember the first call I had with him.
“Why on earth did you install this in a 500-room hotel?”, he asked. (He might have used an expletive stronger than “on earth”, we both used a lot of expletives during our year of almost-daily calls.)
“They told us it was 80% ready”, I said. By this time, I already had serious doubts, but the sales guy from the lock company was adamant which I think means he was an excellent liar and probably a good poker player.
“More like 20% ready for market.”, my soon-to-be best friend in Dallas said.
He was an amazingly talented and patient man.
Once a week or so, a floppy disk would arrive by courier with the latest updates. This was in the days when floppy disks were floppy. As in flimsy cardboard things encasing a thin plastic disk coated with a magnetic material.
The disk would be accompanied by an installation procedure written in programming code that could be several pages long. I didn’t understand programming code, but I figured if my mate in Texas had spent time writing the code and sending it to me with the disk, the least I could do was oblige him and follow the code, character by character.
This worked well, although I was still called in almost every night. It turned out that part of the problem was that the lock system crashed when the hotel system went down for the night audit. I’m not sure we ever resolved that.
After many months of installing updates, the lock company decided that they should be the ones doing the updates. I’m not sure why, but they chose Mr. “It’s 80% ready.” to do the next upgrade.
He arrived with the packet from FedEx, opened it up, pulled the disk out and threw the installation instructions in the wastepaper basket.
I looked at him in disbelief.
“Haven’t you ever heard of “Copy Disk”?”, he said, with a look that said of course a security guard has never heard of the “Copy Disk” command…
He copy-disked the floppy into the system and voila.
It worked perfectly.
Until it didn’t.
The call came in about 1:00 a.m. The system was down, the guests were complaining, and what on earth had I done to screw things up this time.
I trodded down to the hotel and ran my trusted reboot procedure.
Voila, we’re up and running!
The next call came at about 3:00 a.m. Nice try, but the system is down again.
Back to the hotel. Reboot. Back home.
I remember the phone waking me up at 05:00 am and thinking “Who could that be?”
Silly me.
5:30 a.m. in Norway is 10:30 p.m. in Dallas. My parents taught me it was rude to call people after 9:00 p.m.
Too bad, Mom, I called my Texan buddy.
He walked me through all kinds of things.
“I just don’t get it. Are you sure you installed the update properly?”
“I didn’t install the update.”
“Who did?”
“Your guy’s guy?”
“Do you know if he followed my instructions?”
“He asked if I had never heard of “Copy Disk”, threw the instructions away, and “copy-disked” the update”, I said.
“Never let that person cross the threshold of your office again! Do not let anyone do updates but you. Who seriously would think I would write six pages of instructions and code if “Copy Disk” would have been enough!”
By this time, it was probably 2:00 a.m. in Texas and my mate wasn’t enjoying the loss of sleep. I didn’t tell him losing sleep had been my hobby for the past ten months. I didn’t mention it because I didn’t have time to.
Every manager in the hotel was lighting up the phones in the security office wondering when I was going to fix “my system”.
That’s what they called it.
“Paul’s system.” Always good to have a scapegoat you can blame guest complaints on.
It wasn’t actually my system. It was part of a corporate plan, led by the airline that owned us at the time. They also owned a credit card company. I think it was the marketing team there that decided the time was right for this innovation to be installed in our flagship hotel.
“Fly with us, stay with us, and let our credit card be your key to a world of experiences.” (Pun probably intended.)
We also ran wires to every door in several other hotels, but the system was never installed anywhere else.
We finally got the green light from corporate and had a meeting with the CEO of the lock company to negotiate a deal to replace the online system with an offline system.
They said they would replace the system for free, but we would have to pay for labour.
We disagreed and said, we’d paid enough of a price through guest guarantees and loss of goodwill. We demanded they cover the cost of labour too.
The CEO of the lock company looked at me and said he understood it had been hard on me. He suggested they could give me a couple of Super Bowl tickets as compensation if we would cover the cost of labour to replace the system.
I never went to the Super Bowl.
They covered the cost of labour and the best lock system I’ve ever known was removed from our hotel.
If only it had worked!
Stay safe, Always Care
Written with the clarity of hindsight, the accuracy of a faded memory, and countless creative liberties, 87 Stories is a journal of how my gap year lasted four decades, made me an emigrant, an immigrant and gave me a life I never dreamed of.
This current series gives a behind-the-scenes look at the wacky, wonderful world of hotels from the eyes of a university dropout who had a storied, basement-to-boardroom career in hotel security. Click on the 87 Stories tab to find earlier episodes of Surreal Stories from the Hidden World of Hotels
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