High Security

I’ve done my best not to poke fun at our cultural differences, but I can’t help commenting on the care with which everything is locked up here in Germany. We have a small room mate sized refrigerator in our office and even it’s locked. There is a security desk at the entrance to the building, a badge scanner beyond the security desk, locks on my office door, then a lock on the fridge, which probably offers a full cubic foot of food storage space. But it’s built so that it can be neither opened nor closed without a key, all for the security of one carton of milk for our coffee.

This week I’ve really met my match with a clothes washer. It’s in the apartment building next to my hotel and accessible only via the locked door to the apartment building, then in a locked room. Both washer and dryer have these padlocked electricity boxes that accept not coins, but tokens, which are sold down the street at the hotel front desk. They’re much more secure than real coins.  And the electricity box is placed so high on the wall that I had to climb on top of the washer to feed my tokens in.  This is all in an upper middle class neighborhood where I don’t think the middle aged residents are going to put much effort in to stealing laundry tokens. But I am relieved to know that the local rabble will have to really work to steal my undies.

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