Dear Cory:

So I’ve been trying to have a key copy made for my office at one of my jobs (I have to share it). There’s only one key so if it gets lost – problems. Plus I want to have it on my key chain rather than have to continually go to fetch it from another office. Sounds easy right?

So I take it to the locksmith to get it copied. I come back, try it and it doesn’t open the door. I go back the next week to the locksmith and they fiddle with it. I come back and it still doesn’t work. I go back a THIRD time yesterday and they jiggle with it. I come back to the office and EUREKA – it works!

Then this morning I get a call from the office to say the key they have isn’t working. You guessed it. The locksmith had switched the keys around on the keychains. What I thought was my new working key was in fact the old one. And now I have to take two buses and a subway to the office to return it on my day off.

FML

Dear Fuck My Luck:

It is a fact that everything performed in our society has to be done an average of twice. On widely separated and seemingly miraculous occasions something will be done correctly the first time and continue to work for a reasonable period (which Cory considers to be 100 years). More frequently, the task will be done incorrectly the first time, necessitating one or more re-enactments. The average is close to two, and climbing. You must build this into your expectations of reality if you are to survive our ghastly era. Technology has run amok and now runs us. Workers are ill-trained and worse paid, vitiating any ambition and sense of pride in work they managed to rescue from the educational system they endured for far too long.

Cory suggests you return to the shop in question and address the tradesman in the following way: “My good swain! My repeated efforts to have a small piece of metal, called a key, shaped by you in a way that would open a device known as a lock, have met with little success at your hands. I might point out that keys and locks have been around since at least the sacking of Ninevah in 621 BCE, that is, 2,637 years. It is not a wholly new technology. There are several possible explanations for this dispiriting circumstance; I’ll mention a couple. One, the little hills and valleys on the blade of the key made you vertiginous enough to pass out while you were examining them with your magnifying device to assure you had cut the key correctly. Two, you used the wrong blank, creating a profound uselessness because the blade was too long or too short and/or the shoulder of the key was not such as would permit the blade’s correct reach into the lock. Human error is understandable if regrettable and all too common, yet I would expect that you immediately hie yourself to your manly vehicle and attend the lock in question with all your tradesman devices and a humble attitude until you can open the lock and door in question to my utter satisfaction and press into my hand both a working duplicate key and the original, which you will mark as such. Have I made myself completely clear to you, my good man?”

Key image by Pinpin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3233953