Everyone else is on the other side of that traffic.

The first question on the call is whether anyone inside can let you in, because that beats any 18 minutes we can drive and it costs nothing. If nobody can, the gate and the ramp behind it have mechanical locks and those can be opened, but a gate serves the whole building rather than your unit, so we ask who is authorizing the work before the van moves. That part is between you and the building. Your own unit door is separate and simpler: $129–$246, picked rather than drilled wherever the mechanism allows, with photo identification checked at the step.

Eighteen minutes on average, measured from the base off Main Street in Midtown. By neighborhood: Midtown about 13 minutes, Transit Area 14, Sunnyhills 15, Parktown 16, Milpitas Manor 18, Hidden Lake Village 19, Milpitas Hills 22, and McCarthy Ranch 24 out at the business park. The reason the number is worth asking anyone about is the geography. The 880, the 680 and the 237 all come together in this city, and a van sent from the far side of that at six in the evening is an hour away, not twenty minutes. If your street is at the long end of the list, the long number is what you are quoted while we are still on the phone.

Yes, a person, at every hour of every day, holidays included. Both ends of the day are the busy ones here — before seven in the morning and after nine at night — because that is when the street is empty and the spare key is with somebody who is driving. Between 8pm and midnight the total carries $48 and between midnight and 7am it carries $86, and both are inside the figure you hear before you agree to anything. The figure quoted at half past six is the figure on the receipt.

Usually it is not the lock. Frames in the sixties tracts have settled, so a bolt that once dropped through the middle of its hole now hits the edge of the strike and gets forced until something inside gives up. Caught early the fix is small: the hinges get shimmed, the strike is moved and screwed into framing rather than trim, and the bolt drops with two fingers again. Left alone it turns into a lockout at $129–$246 plus replacement hardware at $126–$338, generally on the evening somebody leans on it a little harder than usual.

Weekends and public holidays cost what a Tuesday afternoon costs here. Only the clock moves a total: $48 for an arrival between 8pm and midnight, $86 between midnight and 7am, both counted inside the number you are quoted. A house lockout that runs $146 in daylight is quoted at $194 at ten in the evening and $232 at two in the morning, and there is no second figure waiting for you at the door.

Four things, cheapest first. Repin every exterior cylinder at $30–$47 each, because the keys handed over at closing have passed through an agent, a painter and a cleaning crew, and bring the front door, the garage service door and any gate onto one key while the van is already at the curb. Second, do not skip the garage service door, which on these tracts is the second way into the house and often the weakest thing on the property. Third, check the strikes, since a settled frame is standard in this city and a moved strike costs almost nothing against what it prevents. Fourth, if an exterior door is running on a knob latch alone, a real deadbolt fitted is $126–$338.

No, and anyone who promises that on the phone is selling access they do not hold. Which remote or card opens which shared door is a list kept by the management company, and adding, replacing or canceling one happens in their office rather than in a van. Ours is the mechanical half of the same building: the unit door, the small lock on the mailbox bank, the parcel room, the storage cage, and the override cylinder on a shared door when the building asks for it. Call the office about the list, call us about the metal.

That gets settled on the call, before anybody drives out. Those doors serve a whole building, so we ask who is authorizing the work, take the instruction from them, and make the receipt out in that name or in both names. It is a question between a resident and the building, and we will not decide it on anyone's behalf. On your own unit door it is straightforward: photo identification with the address, or identification plus a lease, a utility bill or something else that ties you to the unit.

Three things move a job inside its range, and the neighborhood is not one of them: the state of the door and whether it still hangs square, what has already been cut into the leaf and how the strike meets the bolt, and the clock, since $48 rides on an 8pm arrival and $86 on one after midnight. That is exactly why a keypad install is written as $198–$496 rather than as one price. Describe the door on the phone and the range collapses to a single number, which is the number that ends up on the receipt. The $89 call-out is inside it either way and is never added at the end.

Yes, at any hour, on the same price list as the city itself. North San Jose runs about 25 minutes, Fremont 27, Alviso 29, Santa Clara 31, Newark 33 and Sunnyvale 35. The address changes the wait, not the total, and the wait is said out loud before you decide to hold on for it. Inside the city it is 13 to 24 minutes by neighborhood, which is the whole argument for calling somebody whose van already starts here.