February 24, 2026
Beep. Badge. Bedlam.
We installed a single turnstile to feel secure
From lobby lines to elevator chaos — the badge wars split the internet
TLDR: A corporate buyout flipped on turnstiles, garage gates, and elevator badge checks, unleashing long lines and frazzled workers. The crowd split between “real security and smoother elevators” and “tracking theater,” with everyone agreeing the user experience was the real villain—proof that clumsy locks can jam a whole office.
Office life, meet theme park lines. After a big-company buyout, one team’s building went full badge: parking garage, lobby turnstiles, even elevator buttons required a scan. Mock day was cute—beep, green, applause. Day two? A 30‑minute human snake winding from garage to lobby to elevator hell. The author even drops a side-quest about a tool hitting Jira for every click and storing logins in a base64 cookie—cue the collective facepalm.
Commenters dove into the security theater brawl. CoffeeOnWrite shut it down: threat model first; this is just bad implementation. Apreche flexed big‑city experience: properly set up, there are no lines and turnstiles actually make elevator flow smoother. Normal_gaussian and knallfrosch weighed in: strong access control can be legit—inefficient, sure, but not pretend. Then heytakeiteasy added the spicy take: it’s also about tracking where you go and when. The meme factory lit up: “Green Light of Shame,” “Standup in the Lobby,” and “Disney FastPass for Elevators.” And yes, the base64‑cookie confession became the running joke—“intern‑tier security” vs. “mall‑cop analytics.” The vibe: not whether to secure, but why it felt like a beep‑beep conga line instead of good design.
Key Points
- •Post-acquisition, the company implemented key card readers at entrances, elevators, and parking, plus lobby turnstiles across three 13‑story buildings.
- •Parking access activation caused lines that were initially manageable.
- •Door access activation led to employees being locked out without cards and relying on others to let them in despite instructions.
- •Turnstiles were activated in a mock mode first, then fully, resulting in long lines and delays at building entry and parking.
- •Elevator key card readers required individual scans for floor access, creating additional bottlenecks and congestion.