Watchclocks: an early device for controlling users
Here's a good explanation of the workings of the "watchclock," a device carried by watchmen in order to allow their employers to check up on their patrolling. It's one of the earliest examples of a sophisticated device intended to control the behavior of its user.
Who Watches the Watchman? (via Kottke)The key, literally, to the watchclock system is that the watchman is required to "clock in" at a series of perhaps a dozen or more checkpoints throughout the premises. Positioned at each checkpoint is a unique, coded key nestled in a little steel box and secured by a small chain. Each keybox is permanently and discreetly installed in strategically-placed nooks and crannies throughout the building, for example in a broom closet or behind a stairway.
The watchman makes his patrol. He visits every checkpoint and clicks each unique key into the watchclock. Within the device, the clockwork marks the exact time and key-location code to a paper disk or strip. If the watchman visits all checkpoints in order, they will have completed their required patrol route.
The watchman's supervisor can subsequently unlock the device itself (the watchman himself cannot open the watchclock) and review the paper records to confirm if the watchman was or was not doing their job.
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Yea clever design solutions. This thing is sexy, and the whole coded key system is freaking elegant.
Booo! mechanized micromanaging. It would totally suck having to work with this thing every night. I've found punching a time clock twice a shift to be demeaning enough.
There's a great scene with one of these in Mike Leigh's Naked.
You can still find Detex Watchclock keys on older buildings. Once you know what the little boxes look like, you'll start seeing them everywhere.
We have a bar code on our mail box labeled "Managed Service Point", a modern version of the same system.
I saw crewmembers on board the Alaska Marine Highway ferries with these last summer. Good to finally know what the hell they're for.
I used to use the modern equivalent. I forgetwhat they the manufacturer called it, but in the (private security) industry, we call it the Diggy Stick.
It was a very hefty 6 inch long by 1 1/2 inch in diameter steel rod. One end had a ring-clip on it, but we used holsters - the device was designed to by 'misused' as a blunt weapon - the other end had a circular hollow at the end. The device was waterproof, seemed pretty impervious to tampering, and supposedly had all of it's internal electronics buried in a block of epoxy resin.
If you ever see, stuck to the wall, or a fencepost, a silver little button, like an oversized watch battery, on your adventures... that's where you put the Diggy. They're coded, and the stick has an internal ram. Put the stick on the button, hear the beep, and move on. Later, your boss downloads your travels.
Some outfits used to keep a wallet full of the buttons, laid out in a matrix.. you'd come up to a fight and vandalism, and +beep+ the fight button, +beep+ the vandalism button, and then +beep+ the nearest geomarked button. After things settled down, of course.
Some guys didnt like having to use the Diggy, but I was doing my patrols cause I liked staying in motion. With the stick, I know that noone could try and say I was in location X, misusing my positon, when the Diggy said otherwise.
Back in my college days (in the 80s), I worked as a nighttime security guard for a clothing manufacturing company in a small town, and I had to use one of these on my hourly rounds.
The main lock on the device I used was broken, so if I ever fell asleep and missed a round, I could turn back time and fix it. (Not that I did that very often.) However, there was a pin inside that punched a hole whenever the device was opened and closed...to alert the head security guy that you fiddled with it. No one ever called me on it, so I assume that he either didn't care or didn't notice.
The worst (scariest) place a key was located on my round was in a boiler room...only because the ancient boilers creaked and whined, and I was convinced they would explode at any moment.
I imagine all those punched paper disks are stored in a forgotten warehouse somewhere to be discovered 50 years from now.
Worth it for the title.
@Brother Provisional (#1)
Well, it's not really micro-managing, as the route and times are already set in advance. It's just checking, like those lists in the washroom. Quality control, in a sense, since a watchman who take as nap instead of making his 2 am round delivers a faulty service.
Yes, in an ideal world, a watchman would not be needed to be forced to check of his rounds in such a way. (Okay, in an ideal world we wouldn't need watchmen, but you know what I mean).
I used a modern barcode-based version of this as a nighttime watchman, summer temping in college. The modern reader has a barcode scanner, and the "keys" are small barcode stickers scattered around the building.
For the two most remote stickers in the basement I made polaroids that I could scan, so I didn't actually have to make the trip downstairs. No windows or doors down there anyway.
Appearantlt, the old-school watchclock was more tamper-proof.
I had to use one of these in the 90s (also at a clothing factory like @tomajortom).
I was reloading one at the main office one night and wrote things like "read more books" and "you are not what you own" along the paper roll just to see if anyone ever opened them and checked on us. They didn't. I found out later that they just sat there in case something happened that could be pinned on a lazy guard.
Many years ago when I was attending the university, I was a night security guard at a plywood plant where I had to carry one of those. It was heavy and I would purposely whack it against the machinery as I did my rounds. After about a year of dutifully going around the plant three times per shift, and putting the key into the clock, a supervisor came by to check on me and let slip that they never ever checked the paper wheel inside - it was shredded from being punched so many times by the keys. I worked there for another year and I never punched the clock again until I was training my replacement.
RFID scanners scattered throughout the building. RFID chips in the name tag of every employee. You don't even know you're being tracked ...
#9, good point. Quality control- and considering all the people in this thread who admitted skipping inconvenient checkpoints, very much needed. When I worked on a ship, we didn't have anything but a log book that was easy to forge, but the incentive to be thorough was that if we missed a problem, like a leak, a fire, or a clogged pump, the ship could sink and we could die. And people (me icluded) still occasionally got too lazy to check properly.
As a burglar I love these devices it means I can plan my activities knowing that the guard is off collecting time stamps.
I used one of these when I was a security guard in college in the late 70's. The site was an old country club where the rich folks in town played golf and ate dinner. Upstairs was where one of the key stations was placed. It was the old servants (maybe even slave) quarters. I am convinced it was haunted and I turned that key in the clock as fast as I could and ran down the hallway to the other end to go down the stairs. Still creeps me out thinking about it.
But the good part about working there...I always got a big plate of whatever food they had leftover. There was also an outside pool that I had to monitor. At least once a month I would catch girls skinny dipping in the pool. Good times.
@14 Well, in all fairness I can see the point of #10/Godot. If he's there for security reasons - which I assume - checking a basement with no access to the outside is pointless and all but the stupidest guards will realize this and may come to resent the whole routine because of this.
And I'll note that lots of people here did make their route, even when they knew that the control was off.
These have another crucial use: should anything happen to a guard there's a clear record of where he or she last was...
I, too, worked as a night security guard during college in the mid-80's.
I worked in the biochem labs at my university, and had to carry one of those Detex clocks on my rounds. Like Tomajortom, I had a scariest place - in my case, it was a sub-basement full of heavy machinery - boilers, pumps, generators, who knows what, all creating quite an impressive horror movie soundtrack. At one point there was a long, narrow tunnel I had to go through, and (this being the biochem labs and all) I would always be sure that the club-wielding Neanderthal from "Altered States" was waiting at the far end!
Needless to say, after the first few months that sub-basement got patrolled a lot less often. I can only assume that they didn't check the Detex clock, since no one ever said a word to me about my shortened rounds.
The old key boxes are scattered all over the building where my shop is. It's an old industrial building, probably from the 20's, and I don't think anyone bothered to be subtle about the box location. Most of them are right next to the elevator, and still have the key hanging on them.
I have seen these systems still in use, although using smaller personal devices, in a couple of locations. I have regular evening appointments in an old office building where the security guards use what sounds like the Diggy Stick. Royal blue, and somewhat barbell shaped. Makes a beeping sound when the guard pushes it into something at the end of the hall by the emergency exit. I also know of a grocery store chain that uses an outside cleaning service and a smaller but similar system to keep their shopping areas regularly swept. Watching very the discreet person with the broom and dustpan pause near major displays so they can wave a card in front of a sensor is actually pretty creepy.
I saw the image and thought, "Hey -- there's a wonderful thing! Just like the ones I used in '73-'74..." Then I read Cory's text, which pretty much killed that happy buzz. A "device intended to control the behavior of its user" LOL! Don't worry kids, there were no brain probes or vampire-bites involved; just a handy little gizmo to show The Man that his stash had been properly watched over during his absence. These were great for that: rugged, hands-free carry, easy to operate, not prone to the errors/fudging/hassle of written records.
This could have been headed with "How did we geo-locate before GPS?" or "Ancient ancestor to swiping security cards"...how can you not love it, Cory? It's practically steampunk straight out of the box ;-)
I used to tote one of these in a GE plant that cast stators for A/C compressor motors. Given the large machine shop in the plant, my first between-rounds project was getting the clock apart to see how it worked (very patient work, since the clock had to be operational 35 minutes out of every hour ;-). One Sunday morning I had to sacrifice a clock -- a pot of molten aluminum lost its bung, and nothing else was at hand to serve as a stopper; pushed the clock into the hole with a steel rod, dashed out to get mud in a bucket, and had my own Atlas Shrugged moment plugging the bung with handthrown clay missiles while the clock did an industrial rendition of Persistence of Memory; got a $50 bonus for that adventure!
I, too, used one of these in the late '70s/early '80s as a security guard. There were only about 20 possible keys, and they were easily identified by their numbers. I had a series of 4 locations to hit every hour, which required a walk of almost 30 minutes. The areas were always deserted and I could see virtually the entire area, so this struck me as "checking the guard" practice.
But I checked the key numbers, and "obtained" identical keys elsewhere, so I never had to leave my comfortable post to make my rounds in the snow and rain or gloom of night during my 13+ hour shift. I just had to remember to punch the clock with the proper keys sequence every half hour.
During my second year of this, my supervisor said that I was the *only* person who this client liked, since I always "made my rounds", where so many other guards missed one or two per night and had to be docked or fired. According to my supervisor, this client *always* checked the tapes and made life miserable for the security company when he thought the guards weren't making the rounds every hour.
Ah, I remember that gaming the system in that job so fondly.
Neat-o! The warehouse I used to rent space in had they keys and boxes all over the building. I knew what they were for but hadn't seen the device they went to. I still wish I had taken one of the key holders; the building is boarded up and likely to be torn down any day now. It caught fire the other day and has large holes in the roof. Sigh!!
A friend of mine has one of those diggy stick setups. Neat to hear about the wallet of event codes!
One note about skipping spots on a watchman route: a watchman isn't just to keep an eye out for guard reasons. It's also to keep an eye out on the physical plant. As S2's story shows, watchmen can provide an important first line of defense when something goes wrong with equipment or at least quickly make contact with someone that can keep the equipment from destroying the building.
I used this exact model in my night job at college in the late eighties early nineties, working at a chemical factory. Yeah, to some extent these were designed to control users, but where I worked, the paper rolls were only checked if something happened. They were primarily kept for insurance records or in case of lawsuit.
And there had to be one person on every shift with the key to the clock, otherwise you wouldn't be able to put in new tapes when they ran out. Not that the tapes were easy to read. The keys punched a little tiny number in a given location. They weren't accurate and if you went fast, the keys would overlaps and cut through the paper, sometimes causing a jam (which usually wasn't readily apparent).
I can tell you that the generations of watchmen who came before me had figured out some very creative ways to get around this. I heard of one guy who basically detached all the keys and brought them back to the gatehouse and just punched them at the correct time. There were only twenty unique keys so he didn't even need to take them all, just the first twenty.
For me, I made them a game. I'd hit a point where I was too tired to read (I only got about 3 hours a sleep a day then thanks to school, sports, and work, so I would see how fast I could hit them, or if I could find them all. I worked in a multi-acre chemical plant with probably 25 buildings. The locations of some keys were actually unknown and undocumented, or weren't where they were supposed to be. Helped passed the time and keep me awake.
In the dead of winter (this was way upstate New York), it was tempting to cheat, but my supervisor would usually have me do the abbreviated tours, so I never personally cheated, but these things were absolutely no guarantee that the watchmen was doing his or her job.
There's a little box in the stairwell of my building that I had heretofore wondered about. It's empty with a small hook inside and something about watchmen on the cover. Thanks for posting this, I can't wait to tell everyone at work that the mystery has been solved. -)
They probably keep them for insurance purposes. Having the guard on duty lowers premiums, but the insurance company wants some proof the guard was there....
There's a book called "Erewhon" from the 1880s by a Samuel Butler that's kind of interesting: the protagonist stumbles on a lost civilization that had steam engines and powered factories and trains and whatnot about 600 years earlier, but they decided to abandon technology when they realized that machines would evolve to replace them the same way animals had replaced flowers in the great scheme of things (To use Mr. Butlers kind of wonky argument).
Yeah, that's sort of a cliche nowadays, but this was in the 1880s, probably the first instance of that ever. The watch 'designed to control behavior' immediately made me think of that.
Being micromanaged? Isn't that to be expected when working for "the man?" No matter what form it takes.
Cory, how could you pass up a chance to use the title "Who watches the watchmen?"
Ok so now we know what watches them and also who watches what's watching the watchmen.
Evil Watchman Story: Many years ago a patient wandered off into the infrastructure of one of the many huge hospitals that we have kitty-corner from each other in downtown Toronto (makes for a better disaster movie when they all get taken out by the same earthquake-crack you know!). A lock-down and full building search were done but they didn't find him. Three days later they found the de-hydrated body in a locked air-conditioner room that not only had the security guards lied in their log books about checking but was also supposed to be checked at night by one of the watchmen.
There's a terrific scene in Fritz Lang's M, in which the confederation of underworld types take over the warehouse in which they have cornered Peter Lorre. They tie up the night watchman, but then have to send someone around with his keys to a series of alarm boxes that (if I'm remembering this correctly) are timed to go off if the watchman doesn't make his rounds.
Here's a picture of a Deggy button at Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Deggy is the modern, electronic equivalent of these older, manual watchclocks.
http://photo.transmit.net/picture/px10216-lg.html
http://www.deggy.com/
BoingBoing has an incredible percentage of former security gaurds.
I can't believe that no one's mentioned Silence of the Lambs yet; in the book (don't remember it being used in the movie), Lecter figures out that Starling's father was a night watchman rather than a full-blown cop because he uses one of these things when he's making his nightly rounds in town.
I used to wonder why someone wouldn't just make up their own set of keys, a la UUbuntu, but I suppose that, in addition to having to keep them concealed and the possibility of being caught out if something did indeed happen, if someone was smart enough to pull off the duplication they could probably get a better-paying job with better hours--as a locksmith, say.
The thing I've always wondered about? If you can't even trust them to make their rounds, why would you feel secure with them guarding your property?
I used to have a security guard job in toronto with a similar system. I had a route to run with a pass card (so definitely no fiddling). The thing was, I'd get in trouble if I was away from the security desk for more than 10 minutes. The route as a good 20 minute brisk walk. Which means I literally had to tear through the building at full speed to get to all the stations in time.
The unfortunate part is that this has to be the most unsecured building in the city, because the guards have no time to take in their surroundings. The only thing that matters is running to the next swipe station.
What made it worse is that all the stations were in poorly lit areas, it was a night shift and they had hired a 16 year old girl to do it (me). They also expected me to break up fights on the front lawn.
Needless to say, I skipped that part.
oh so THIS is who watches the watchman!
@#26
rats, beat me to it.
@30 For most people, your reasoning is reversed. Many, if not most people, will expect or tolerate minor infractions or even make them themselves. A shopkeeper, for example, will (try to) guard against employees shoplifting. He will, however, usually not be concerned of them suddenly ganging up on him and murdering him.
Secondly, it's not just a matter of general distrust, even though there certainly are bosses/managers who are control freaks and who can't imagine honest workers. (Which, in my opinion, is usually a good indicator about how much one can trust them, in return). Leaving those aside, two totally legit reasons remain.
a) The insurance company wants proof.
b) Guarding is, mostly, a boring job and offers hardly any incentive, apart from the rare cases like shifts on ships, etc, mentioned by one poster above. Unlike other boring and mundane jobs, it doesn't even any accomplishment. Underrated as their job is by many, the cleaning crew at least know that they entered a dirty building and leave a clean in one, even if many of the better paid people don't really realize and appreciate this. But a night guard in a save environment doesn't even have that. In one of thousands rounds him being there and not taking a nap or goofing off or watching TV does *might* make a difference. Clocking off, as stupid as it might look, provides a tangible goal, a clear purpose, instead of offering that rather 1:1000 chance of being needed.
I work graveyard security presently, and while my property has a similar device installed everywhere, they haven't been used in years. The Man actually came to see that forcing guards to complete a patrol in any kind of established order or time was detrimental to them actually deterring crime. Predictability created opportunity for subjects to take advantage of knowing where we'd be at certain times.
In fact, the very last of our time-designated duties was done away with in the last month, after an incident where someone did exactly that.
Of course that isn't to say there isn't any accountability for how an officer's time is spent here. That's what the 100+ cameras are for.
Of course, one must frequently change the time and order of patrols, in case other parties memorize the timing and plan accordingly.
Well, in the long run simple patrolling will be a machines jobs.
Happy little walkers strolling around the premises, uses infrared, sound and scent detectors, able to ping allowed personnel and being equipped with tasers.
Building on Boba Fett's comment re: Lang's M, I'd thought that the purpose of these is to establish a security perimeter: that a watchmen's not clocking in on time would show, not that he's fucking off somehow, but that he'd been prevented from doing so, likely through some kind of violence. Were these really invented because of lazy night security folks?
When I was a kid, the church we went to met at an old high school. Just outside the entrance there was one of these keys hanging from an otherwise empty brick wall. For years I imagined that there was some mystic date and time when a moon beam would filter through the branches of the trees above and produce a magical keyhole that could be opened by this mysterious captive key.
Then one day someone's dad let me in on what it was really for. I have to say that I was glad to finally know for sure, but let down at the same time.
#37 What's described in the Lang Movie is a dead man's switch, sure. But the clock this blog entry's about is anything but that. That's indeed just a punch clock making sure that the guards walks the walk.
I used one in the mid to late 90s as a security guard in a nursing home in Buffalo. I loved that clunky old thing in its leather case. The building was a former hospital from the 1920s or 30s and the clock was from the same period.
-Sunspot
We ran into one of these key boxes two years ago in the Lodge at Starved Rock, IL http://www.flickr.com/photos/lnmgilbert/527899418/in/set-72157600335542199/
Hmm, I'd think someone could design a game for this. Randomize the route, give clues, make it interesting, maybe even fun. Better security, more job enjoyment.
As for collecting the appropriate keys and not even making the rounds like UUbuntu, the next step would be to get a robot arm, a micro, and program it to punch it automatically. Put some random time slop in so it doesn't look too uniform...
I've read that some hospitals have RFID tags for doctors & nurses, so if there's an emergency, they can be quickly located.
And there's been some issues in Boston for having GPS trackers on snow plows. Helps track progress and planning during blizzards, but also fingers drivers taking extended breaks. Might be good for ALL emergency vehicles...
And I remember a story a year or so ago about a kid who was ticketed for speeding. His dad had installed a GPS locator to monitor him, and the GPS showed that the kid wasn't speeding, so dad & the kid challanged the ticket and won.
Like many ne'r do well college students I took a job as a security guard and was assigned the 6PM to 6AM shift at a trucking warehouse. Doing the hourly rounds was just crazy since I could see all the watchclock stations from the office windows.
Strangely enough the management left me the key to the clock and eventually I just went out at midnight or something and went to each station, opened the clock and moved the paper around and used the punch key to make it look like I did hourly patrols. One round, nobody suffered and I could sit on my butt watching my little 5" portable TV all night.
Nobody ever called me on it and as far as I know we never had a security incident during my watch.
Oh man, I remember lugging one of those around on the midnight to 8:00 AM shift when I worked for First Security back in the mid 80s. I was stationed in a small but cushy corporate headquarters building in Norwood, MA and my hourly rounds used to take me a grand total of 10 min of indoor walking to complete. Sometimes I'd get creative and run the round or do them in random order. The site supervisor at the time didn't care what you did each night so long as you made one each hour (Jerry was a good guy to work for).
The best part of the job was having 50 minutes of each hour free to read book or goof around on my Mac 512ke that I used to lug in with me each night. Ah, the hours I wasted playing Dark Castle and Strategic Conquest - fond memories.
They get a discount on their insurance to have night watchmen, and to be able to show they make their rounds. The are also good for ensuring the guard went by to check on what ever process was cooking away, that should be ok to leave overnight (and a number to call if it is not).
One place I worked had very professional guards, the expected the new people to learn the route and be able to run it in any order, with random start times, we just made sure we did an average of a check an hour. No way to be sure the guard was not going to come by, even though he had been by a minute earlier. Then the company got a new security manager who wanted them to be done in order, so as to make the tape easier to read (I believe ours used a tape which lasted something like a week), and I think on the hour. Well, if you don't care about employee theft.
One other thought: If something *does* happen, the log from the watchclock could be used to help pinpoint when the bad thing happened.
For anyone who's interested, other modern equivalents to the watchclock include the brands TouchProbe and Proxiguard. We use both at my work.