My first lockpick, which I did not use for this.

Last Friday, a terrible thing happened in the first floor lounge of West Hall at Olin College.  The foozeball table, known and loved by many, was flipped.  While most furniture is unharmed by this kind of tomfoolery, the foozeball table (as I now know) has a bunch of wooden chutes inside that direct balls from the goals to the ball return.  One of these had been dislodged, and people could no longer get the balls out!  On no!

The chutes in question

Fortunately, this was actually part of the design of the table.  The explanation we came up with was that at commercial foozeball-halls, the ball return is disabled so that the owners can sell balls.  The whole table acts like a giant hinged box to hold the balls, until the owner comes by with the key and retrieves them.

Picked!

Using my friends hook and tension wrench, I had both wafer tumblers picked in a jiffy.  The ramp was re-lodged, tested, and the balls were retrieved.  While the ethics of lockpicking on locks in use is somewhat grey, I feel like it was justified.  Normally the rules for picking are are:

“Do not pick locks you do not own or have explicit permission to pick.  Never pick a lock that are in use”

But this time it was a lock that the students owned (and I was being asked to pick), and by being in use it was obstructing the use of the table.  I also had sufficient skill and knowledge of the working of the lock to pick it without damaging it.

Yay using lockpicking for good!