Take all the worry out of your mind

[austin_dern]

So, the plan is, to replace the current access-card system, a mechanism in which you slide your staff (or student) card into a reader and have it accept you three times out of five to unlock the door, with a reader you simply tap to have your card unlock the door with an unspecified success rate per tap. My question: do we have to get replacement cards, or are our current staff cards designed to work with the tap reader?

The official answer: ``They should work with the new reader.'' I'd like to say I'm heartened, but there are a lot of things that all involved agree should work, yet don't. I just hope somebody else unlocks the classroom needed for my evening class.

I don't believe it's coincidental, but I also don't know the connection here: somebody's taken out half the soap dispensers in all the (men's) bathrooms in the building. There's normally one on either side of the sink counter; one of each -- not from the same side -- have been taken off and put on free counter space. I hope this is just connected to a change in the type of soap dispenser used, since one dispenser for each bathroom causes (thanks to the geometry of it) little traffic jams, with the person at the sink nearest the dispenser almost invariably participating in some slightly odd and very time-consuming activity like brushing teeth or slurping up the water and gargling with it. Public bathroom faucet garglers never notice other people needing to get around them.

Trivia: New York City theater owners were able to receive $225 per seat for the 1850-52 concert tour of Jenny Lind. Source: The Antebellum Period, James M Volo, Dorothy Denneen Volo.

Currently Reading: The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan.

Comments

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

When I worked at B&N and we changed from a slide reader to a 'vicinity' card we had to all get new cards.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah ... the curious thing to me is I've been issued three ID cards, to date, all based on the set of passport photos I sent in years ago, not updated since. (My only major style change since then is I don't wear sweaters, for good reason.) I'm curious how long they'll keep the old picture around to issue me new cards. I've never lost one, mind you; they just keep issuing new ones every couple of years for whatever reason.

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

I just remembered. It's a 'proximity' card, not vicinity. They must have digitized your picture and make cards that way. The new prox cards at B&N had no identifying information on them, they were all blank, unlike the previous ones with names and pictures. Was for 'more security' they said.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Peculiarly, security isn't one of the advertised features of the staff cards here, although in my experience its principal use is that it limits access to the men's room on the floor I'm on. (During office hours, I can use a men's room on another floor without going through a locked door.) Of course, I've been using the Visitors Card given years ago when I first got here while waiting for my real staff card, saving the surface of my card a lot of scraping, apart from what's necessary for the library self-checkout stations.