Nuclear Padlocks and Why We’re All Fucked.

For a long time, I’ve been interested in the field of Nuclear Semiotics, which- Wait, come back.

I know, I know, that sounds so nerdy that 30% of everyone’s virginity just grew back, but bear with me. Let’s ease into this, okay? How about a little on my day, first?

A guy came into the hardware store today with a faulty padlock. It was the kind with numbered dials rather than an actual key, and it was indeed faulty. So we gave him a new one, and this man — who, like most of my customers, was at least eleventy three years old —could not fathom a padlock with numbers on even when it was working.

For the sake of this story, I’m going to draw the padlock. You might already know that I’m quite the Renaissance man, so please bear in mind that what you see is, in fact, a drawing of the ABUS 140/65 combination lock and not an actual padlock floating mysteriously in the middle of your screen.

He had to have it explained to him multiple times how to lock it and then unlock it by putting in the code that he’d picked and asked us to set. He had no chance of being able to set it himself.

When he told us to use the code “1981,” he asked how his employees (because of course this ancient fucker was rich and owned land) would know whether the code ran top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top. In…