What did he do?

December 20, 2006 6:43 PM

I was at a business hotel a couple of days ago, sitting in the Business Center, when an employee came in with a key or something and touched it to a small metal circle on the casing for the (metal and glass) door. Then he split. What did he do and why? (WAGs are OK but knowledgeable answers preferred.)
posted by megatherium to Travel & Transportation (19 answers total)

Security - timed so it is known when hotel staff are checking each area of the hotel.
posted by meerkatty at 6:47 PM on December 20, 2006

what meerkatty said. Did it look like this?
posted by saffry at 6:50 PM on December 20, 2006

thirding meerkatty's answer. They have a small wand and there are contact points spread all over the building. This device allows their boss to be sure the security staff are making their appointed rounds.
posted by cosmicbandito at 7:01 PM on December 20, 2006

The old fashioned way that worked, back in pre-electronic days, was that the watchman carried a mechanical alarm. As he walked around the factory/place the stations had keys which he could use to wind up the clock, thus preventing the alarm in it from going off. (Or was it that he carried the key, and there were clocks all over the place? I think you could do it both ways.)

As those above said, the goal of it was to make sure he actually was doing the rounds, instead of spending his entire shift in the guard office sleeping.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 7:06 PM on December 20, 2006

Those answers are probably right, but I'll just pipe in and say the security locks on our doors at work (which usually require a passcode to open them) can also be unlocked with a small plastic dongle with a metal circle on the end. The metal piece on the dongle is touched to a metal circle on the lock. To re-lock it, you just touch it again. The metal circle is a little less than 1/2 an inch in diameter.
posted by muddgirl at 7:23 PM on December 20, 2006

Meerkatty is right on. As someone who used to have to make those rounds, its actually kinda fun for the first few rounds - it's like a scavenger hunt!
posted by plaidrabbit at 7:27 PM on December 20, 2006

See the movie Naked for a dramatization of this activity.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 7:36 PM on December 20, 2006

While it might seem that the primary reason is to ensure employee diligence, more often than not it's a safety mechanism. If a spot check is missed it often means that additional staff will be dispatched to the area on route to see if assistance is needed.

It's similar to leaving a phone offhook in most large companies.
posted by purephase at 7:55 PM on December 20, 2006

Kraftmatic - IIRC, Silence of the Lambs discusses the old-fashioned version of this, too. Wasn't Clarice's father a night watchman?
posted by Addlepated at 7:55 PM on December 20, 2006

It's totally security. Nightwatch also shows Ewan McGregor doing this the old fashioned way. He carried around a circular case and had to use keys throughout the morgue as he did his rounds.
posted by tastybrains at 8:53 PM on December 20, 2006

Addlepated Yep, not mentioned much in the movie, the book goes into it and the job's role in his death.
posted by Science! at 8:55 PM on December 20, 2006

SCDB: In the systems I've seen, they carried just the key, and inserted into the clock. When the key was turned, it generated a timestamp on a record within the clock.

But that's a variation on even older self-checking systems. In the US Lifesaving Service, one of the forerunners of today's Coast Guard, patrolmen used such a system when dispatched from lifesaving stations located up and down long stretches of dangerous barrier beach or rocky coast. During the day, servicemen manned lookout towers which afforded visibility of several miles. During the night or in fog, though, a wreck might take place and be unseen from shore. Beach patrols were the means of monitoring the shore at those times. Stations might be anywhere from two to ten miles apart. A patrolman woud leave his station, walk the beach to the halfway point between his station and the next, and meet the patrolmen from the adjacent station. The two men would exchange metal tags, each stamped with their service number and station ID, to prove they had met and completed their patrol.
posted by Miko at 9:00 PM on December 20, 2006

The old fashioned way is called a Detex clock. The one I used to carry, 20-25 years ago looked kind of like this one (second one down). It didn't have an alarm in it. I was told it had a paper tape in it, and we'd go from key to key, inserting the key to punch it.

Usually we started a shift by whacking it hard against a wall a few times to make sure it was broken, so we could nap. This is what happens, I suppose, when you hire folks for minimum wage, and schedule them for 90+ hours a week.
posted by QIbHom at 9:39 PM on December 20, 2006

As for the technology, it sounds like Dallas Semiconductor One-wire buttons. (Dallas was bought by Maxim.)

They are neat little thingies, with a variety of different functions... some just contain serial numbers, others have embedded flash, real time clocks, thermometers, etc.

They are powed by the same electrical lines that read/write to them, hence the One-wire moniker.

http://www.maxim-ic.com/1-Wire.cfm

Used in a lot of inventory control, security, and asset tracking systems, as well as some data collection stuff.
posted by FauxScot at 1:46 AM on December 21, 2006

QIbHom writes "Usually we started a shift by whacking it hard against a wall a few times to make sure it was broken, so we could nap. This is what happens, I suppose, when you hire folks for minimum wage, and schedule them for 90+ hours a week."

One of my great uncles worked night security at a mine that used the multiple key and single clock/punch method of job monitoring. He showed me this massive ring of keys that he'd made, by hand with a file set, over the course of a few months that duplicated all the keys on his route. He explained that he had to walk the route because they changed the key order at random intervals (and to make sure no suit was working late) but after that he could sit in the guard shack.
posted by Mitheral at 7:12 AM on December 21, 2006

10 years ago it was barcode readers, with strips at all the checkpoints.
posted by dreamsign at 8:17 AM on December 21, 2006

Second the Dallas iButtons, both on probability-of-being-this-thing and coolness. :-)
posted by baylink at 10:45 AM on December 21, 2006

On the other hand, if it was cold weather and the humidity inside was low and there were rugs on the floors, he could have been holding a key and touched it to the metal to discharge built-up static electricity.
posted by KRS at 12:28 PM on December 21, 2006

couldn't it be a employee timeclock?
posted by punkbitch at 5:25 PM on December 21, 2006