[REPOST]

Many years ago, I worked at a company that did phone tech support for a particular piece of well known business software. After outgrowing the building we’d been in, the company moved to an enormous warehouse building they’d renovated into offices and cube space.

The new building had separate parking areas for visitors (of which we basically had none) and employees (who had to park in the rear).

As part of the move, they got a new security crew, who had very specific ideas about access security.

First, the entrances were keyed so that you had to badge in (use your ID to unlock the door). This included the visitors’ entrance – reception had to unlock the door for visitors).

Second, all doors except the front guest entrance and the rear employee’s entrance were switched to exits only, and didn’t have a badge reader to unlock the door from the outside.

Third, they forbade anyone from permitting “drafting”, aka allowing someone else to enter behind you, so that you had to badge in to enter. Several people got write-ups for allowing people to come in after them, just to make that point.

Fourth, and the reason for the story, you had to badge out to prime your badge so that you could badge in. For fire safety, you could exit by any door without badging out, but if you did, you couldn’t unlock a door to re-enter, and had to walk around to the visitor’s entrance to have reception let you in. Because the front and rear entrances were around 500m (1/4mi) from each other, it was easy to have to waste 10 minutes getting back in the building if you forgot to badge out, and in 40C (100F) weather for much of the summer.

The explanation we were given was that they needed to know how many people were in the building in case it had to be evacuated. Of course, that information was on computers that were only accessible inside the building, so…

After the first couple days, during which I, and nearly everyone I knew, had locked themselves out at least once. I realized what I had to do.

Starting on day 3, I’d enter the building, and, immediately after getting through the doors, smack my badge against the exit reader to prime it to let me re-enter. Every time a coworker saw me entering the building, they’d ask me what I was doing, which I’d happily explain.

Within a couple of weeks, I didn’t see a single person coming though the doors who didn’t swing around and smack their badge against the exit reader.

And at the beginning of the next month, security sent out an email that they were no longer requiring exit badging. I like to believe that it was my doing, although it’s also possible that reception was sick and tired of dealing with having to deal with the lunch return rush, and constantly let the smokers back into the building. (never mess with reception).

TL;DR they required us to badge out if we wanted to badge back in, so I badged out immediately on entering, and started a trend.