scanners hate me

I have complaints. So. Many. But also just this one that rules them all.

We have new ID/keycards at work. Half the people reading this already know where this is going.

About a month ago they replaced the scanners with new improved ones that only work if you flash your card at a specific spot for an arbitrary amount of time, unlike the old ones that just let you flash your card and be done. We got used to that.

The new card requires you be a fucking wizard. There is no right angle, or correct area or anything; there is only trying at various distances and angles and levels of frustration until it briefly blips green and you can go in. Every. Scanner. Does. This. Some require nine to ten tries. Tech, dev, testers, admin, it matters not; none of us can use the goddamn door scanners. By now, someone should have gotten it on the first try; no one has.

So that was my day of low-grade frustration and rage because there is nothing more lowering that working tech in a building in which the tech is fighting us and winning.

Also of note: Child stockholmed me into watching more anime, now stuck in Seven Deadly Sins. I am seriously considering getting the manga. This can't be happening.

Comments

[ithiliana]

Oh, wow, the working as a tech when the tech is out to get you is even worse than me feeling so much of the tech (*glares at Google phone) is now smarter than I am.

We have had ongoing hassles at my university with scanners because they tried to set up some system where only people scheduled to teach in a classroom would be given access and could never make it work....it was a nightmare. (One of the many reasons I'm happy teaching online). I think they've changed scanners and systems since then but I gather there are still lots of screwups.

[kara_mckay]

We had cards like that at the last place I worked. We were hourly employees, and our cards also functioned as punch cards, but the time clock scanner rarely gave us trouble. The door on the other hand... well, we ended up just propping the employee entrance open most of the time.

[ilyena_sylph]

Those damn things are made of terrible.

+sympathies+

[out_there]

After working in a prison and dealing with daily eye scanners, I laugh at all the Mission impossible type guests that carefully back into the system and use contact lenses and never have the reality of standing there for five minutes, blinking at the black screen, scanning your thumb again to restart the process, and eventually waving someone down to let you in anyway.

Honestly, just trying, failing and looking resigned to the annoyance of the process should be enough for security to let you in.

[green_grrl]

My brain immediately went to “security vulnerability”—for exactly the reasons kara and out_there mentioned. It's SO easy to do social engineering hack in an environment like that.

[seperis]

Pretty much this. It's ridiculous.

[ivyfic]

At my office, they added a door scanner that never had one before, and now people just prop it open. There's your physical security.

[sara]

At one point they "upgraded" the main door from the elevator bay onto our floor and nobody could open it.

You'd think it would be funny to watch that many people with multiple graduate degrees fight a door, but after the first few days we were all just really tired of it.

[olanthanide]

I just had a sudden and EXTREMELY VIVID flashback to being on campus alone at dark o' clock, scanning my hand over and over again because the handscanner won't let me through the door to my time sensitive experiment. Calling the number posted won't do any good - sometimes it takes even the techs 10 tries to get in the door, the scanner is just like that. There's something about that particular kind of frustration that comes with doing some repetitive, ultimately futile task that really makes you feel like you've been abandoned by the gods.

The high pitched, "entry-denied" beep really didn't help either.

[seperis]

I will hear that devil-sound to the end of my life. It's so smug.

[thornsilver]

I tried "Seven Deadly Sins" anime and bounced hard from the first episode when he was feeling up the unconscious female character.

[seperis]

Yep, that continues through all seasons.

[aerialiste]

My own handy-dandy swipe card doesn't let me into the faculty café, which is very bad because inside the café is the COFFEE. So if I want the COFFEE at 7:45 am I have to stand there with the dog and my bags of books fruitlessly swiping over and over again (faster? slower? slantingly? while saying magic words? chanting the names of Elder Gods?) until essentially someone in the café gets sick of listening to the pitiful beeping and gets up to let me in, so that I can have the COFFEE.

[gargling sounds]

[archaeologist_d]

I hate those damn cards. Luckily when I was working, it was just a wave and it accepted everything.