The Entropy of a Master Key Suite
Entropy is all around us. Everything has entropy: the device you’re reading this on, your haircut, the universe. But master key suites, too, have high levels of the stuff. (There’s a short description of what a master key suite is here.)
What the heck are you on about?
OK, so what even is entropy?
Entropy is a term borrowed from physics, which essentially means how disorderly or random something is. Make sense? Thought not.
Imagine a brand new car. Everything about it is brand new; everything is as it should be. The car’s entropy is therefore low. But the more you use the car, the more worn out the tyres become. The more you use it, the dirtier it gets. The more you use it, the more the insides get worn out. In other words, the car, once perfect, is now ‘disorderly’. It’s not as it should be. Its entropy has increased.
Same with a house. New houses are in good condition, but after enough years the shower starts to leak. Same with a haircut: you look perfect when you leave the barbershop, but within a few weeks your hair is no longer ideal and needs re-doing.
Every single thing in the universe, including the universe itself, follows this pattern of gradual dilapidation.
Why do master suites dilapidate over time?
There are all sorts of reasons why a master suite will dilapidate over time. We’ve seen it all happen first-hand. They all link back to human intervention.
The company that runs the suite goes bust
Businesses inevitably come and go. If the manufacturer of a certain suite (often just a small locksmith company or ironmonger) goes bankrupt, it’s often (but not always) the case that replacement keys and cylinders can no longer be made.
If you need a new key, you’re out of luck. Your only option would be to make do with not enough keys or to replace the cylinder outright. If you do the latter, suddenly your building contains a lock that’s not on the suite.
Communal door security is compromised
Suppose your building runs on a common-entrance suite (where everyone’s flat’s key also opens the communal entrance door). If someone loses their key, then whoever finds that key has access to the communal door of the building and to somebody’s flat.
The way to resolve this would be to replace the lock on the communal door to one that no longer works on the suite. And boom, the primary feature of your suite is broken: everyone now needs two keys to get from outside the building into their flat.
Master key goes missing
Similar to the above scenario, if the master key goes missing, you’re in trouble. Whoever finds that key has full access to every door in the building.
There’s no good solution to this problem. You can either live in fear, or, as happened in our case study, replace the whole darned thing. Losing the master key is a fast-track way to increase the entropy of your suite.
The design of a complex suite gets forgotten
Larger buildings or complexes, e.g. skyscrapers, unversity campuses, hospitals, military garrisons and public transport networks, often are equipped with highly complex master suites. They may have one grand master key that opens everything, and various sub-master suites that open only doors in one building or only doors on one floor.
We had a client whose skyscraper building had a particularly well crafted suite, with all kinds of sub-masters and subdivisions that made perfect sense. The problem was that intricate knowledge of the suite wasn’t passed on by the old building manager to the new one.
He needed some new cylinders made. We asked whether he knew which sub-master he wanted the cylinder on, and he didn’t know. The solution? He asked us to make cylinders that worked on a new differ directly under the grand master key (i.e. not part of a sub-master suite).
This means that, wherever he fitted the new cylinders, the sub-master key that operates that part of the building won’t open the doors with the new cylinders on.
Worst of all, the building is no more than about fifteen years old. That’s quite quick for such a big and elaborate suite to dilapidate. Hopefully it won’t cause too many problems for them down the line!
To be honest, it’s not always such a big deal if a master suite has high entropy. Often people don’t care.
Even in the case of the skyscraper, the management offices in huge buildings typically have extremely efficient key management procedures. This means that there’ll be a document somewhere that says “Use this sub-master key to access this door, use that grand master to access that one”. So it doesn’t cause too much confusion.
The main drawback is often just that the bunch of keys a caretaker has to carry around is slightly larger than it otherwise would have been.