Quote of the day:

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
—Kurt Vonnegut

I’ve been using an August smart lock on my front door since shortly after I moved into this house about five and a half years ago.

One of its annoyances is that the lock and its hub have to connect to both my wi-fi and my bluetooth, but— 

To make a long story short, there are three outlets that are close enough to the front door where the lock is installed and that I could use for the hub, but when I plug the hub into them, the hub can only connect to both the bluetooth and the wi-fi from one of them—and for some reason the wi-fi connection to the hub is not really all that reliable. So ever since I’ve installed the lock, I’ve periodically gotten emails from August support telling me that the hub is not reliably connected to wi-fi. As all the functions of the lock that I care about seem to be working, and there really isn’t any other outlet to plug the hub into, I’ve taken to ignoring and deleting those messages.

Well, as I said, the lock is now over five years old, which as far as tech gadgets go these days, is pretty old. The average life span of many tech gadgets these days is about three years. So I’ve been expecting it to have problems.

And a couple weeks ago, problems emerged.

It became harder to manually turn the lock, and when I told Siri to lock the door, it was pretty much hit or miss. At least, I was able to lock it using the key. First time in this five and a half years that I actually had to use the key.

It seemed that the lock had reached the end of its life. Which I had been expecting.

So I searched for a new one and decided on a Schlage smart lock. It was a lot more expensive, but I decided it might be worth it. Way back when I was initially searching for a smart lock, Schlage had been recommended to me, but at the time, all of Schlage’s smart locks were keyless, and I didn’t trust the technology enough. What if the battery went dead? How could I unlock the door? The current Schlage smart locks have keys, so that removes that objection. And they use the Apple Home Key technology, so I can simply tap my Apple Watch on the lock to unlock. My current smart lock uses an Auto Unlock technology: when I get near enough, it unlocks automatically, which is nice when it works, which is most of the time, but annoying on those occasions when it doesn’t and I have to ask Siri to unlock.

So I was all set to order a Schlage smart lock except— 

We were right in the middle of the “We Ain’t Buying It” protest, which meant I couldn’t order from Amazon. Ah, but a check of the Schlage web page and I saw that it was also carried by—Home Depot. Uh-uh. Can’t buy from them either. Oh, but Lowe’s also carries it. And they aren’t on the DoNotBuyFrom list. Except they were all sold out!

So I waited until the five days passed.

And then I waited a few more. I didn’t want Amazon to think that this was a purchase that was just delayed by a few days because of the protest, so I waited a few more days. And then I placed my order.

No sooner had I placed the order when I got another one of those annoying emails from August. You know, the ones that they keep sending to tell me that the smart lock hub is not connected to wi-fi.

Except before deleting this one, I glanced at it. And it said that the batteries in the smart lock were low and needed to be replaced.

Duh!

After replacing the batteries, the smart lock worked as good as new.

I wouldn’t’ve had to order a new lock. At a much greater price. If I had only been reading those emails.

Oh, well. I think I want the Apple Home Key technology in the Schlage lock anyway, as tapping to open sounds like it should be more reliable than the auto-open technology that August uses. And now that the August smart lock is working again, and it’s cold outside, when the new lock comes, there won’t be any great hurry to install it. I can wait for a warmer day to install it.