The entry keypad

A tenant taps the same four digits into the gate keypad three times before the gate believes him, each attempt separated by the particular pause of someone recalculating whether they remember their own code or a neighbor's. The keypad does not distinguish. It reads the numbers as light pulses off a backlit rubber membrane, worn pale over the one, the four, and the nine by tens of thousands of unrelated thumbs, each one certain, apparently, that it was the only thumb that had ever pressed there. The gate arm rises on the fourth or fifth digit and the car is already rolling before it clears fully, a maneuver every regular tenant performs and every keypad seems built to tolerate. Weather changes the keypad's temperament: cold mornings slow its response by a beat, rain sometimes floods the drainage weep hole at its base and shorts a digit out entirely, and the facility's maintenance log records this roughly twice a winter, attributed each time, generically, to moisture. A call box beside it connects to an office that closes at six. After that the keypad decides alone. It records the code, the date, and the minute, and the office reads none of it unless something is missing.

Arthur Pell