New Door

Most apartment buildings in Paris have two doors on the ground floor. The first door has a combination lock and basically just allows you to get to the letterboxes. The second door is the intercom door so you need a swipey thing or someone to buzz you in to unlock that door. This means that you need to give everyone the code for the front door if you want them to visit you, friends and tradespeople.

Anyway, the front door (the one with the combination) doesn't work terribly well here. Usually you only need to push, rather than enter the combination and push, but it's random. More often than not, it's in the "just push" mode. It's actually still fairly secure because people ing eneral just assume that it works, and then assume that the next internal door works too.

This brings me to the second door, which has never worked. The electronic lock was broken and permanently open. My Italian neighbours told me that this was a preferably condition to before it broke completely when the button to open it from the inside often didn't work, which meant you had to return upstairs and press the buzzer to buzz yourself out. This sounded like a scary fire-trap situation, so I agreed that completely broken was preferable. Anyway, a new electronic lock has been installed and is now in operation, so I have to swipe myself in and if anyone wants to visit me, they'll have to call my intercom for me to buzz them in.