In early January, I lost the only set of keys I had, including the fob, for the truck.
I looked everywhere for two days and couldn’t find them. Ironically, I’d bought an off-brand AirTag for the keys at Dollar General a few weeks before, but when I checked the FindMy app on my iPhone, I was informed that the battery had died, apparently, the day I bought the tag. It would have had to have happened after I added it to my FindMy devices.
I finally gave up hope of finding the keys and called the Ford dealership and asked what it would cost to get one made.
Ford will not allow their dealerships to make replacement keys, with chip, for vehicles more than ten years old. I was advised I would have to call a locksmith. I asked if they had one they work with and they gave me a number.
The locksmith didn’t call me back that day, or the next so I called them the next morning – at this point, I haven’t had keys for 4 days.
They told me they’d come out that day. They arrived in a converted short bus. It was a retired couple, with a big, aggressive (until her people told her it was okay to be friendly) female pit bull. The back of the bus had been converted into a mobile key lab, with a key grinder, wi-fi, blank keys, some reference books and numerous toolboxes.
It took both of them working on it, in this mobile lab, over an hour to make a working key. They charged me $225 for it. This did not include a replacement fob for keyless entry.
That was fine. I could lock and unlock the doors with the key, but I held off looking into a replacement fob. I figured that eventually, the keys had to turn up. After all, I’d driven the truck home so they were at the house.
I found the keys last week. They were in the ashes of a bonfire I’d built in the yard to burn the wood of a tree that fell to a storm a while back. The metal was still there, but the plastic part of the key, the chip inside and the keyless fob were a melted mess.
I finally decided it was time to check into a replacement fob. I gritted my teeth, remembering the $225 charge for a spare key and the more than an hour of labor by two professionals to get a working key.
It cost me less than $10 on Amazon and I was able to program it in under two minutes.
It would have been under a minute, but there were two options. Some Ford, Lincoln, Mercury vehicles required all the doors closed to enter programming mode. Others required the driver door to be open. I tried with the door closed first and it didn’t work, so I opened the door.
Here’s what you do. You take the new fob out to the vehicle, sit in the seat, leave the driver door open and press the unlock button on the door.
Insert the key in the ignition. Turn the key to ON (as far as it will go without triggering the ignition).
Then turn it OFF. And back ON. Then OFF. ON. OFF. ON. Etc.
The 8th time, leave the key in the ON position. If you’ve done it correctly, the door locks will lock and unlock again to let you know the vehicle is in programming mode.
Press a button on the remote and if the locks respond, the remote is programmed. It worked. I was surprised.
I had to go through a similar process to reset the CPU in our new washing machine a while back. I didn’t unplug it during a cold snap (not the recent one, but an earlier one) and I had to go through a whole process of turning the dial through various positions and watching the indicator lights for queues.
It kind of amuses me that modern appliances have these hidden Easter Eggs. In general, I don’t like using software unnecessarily. I prefer off buttons that physically break the circuit. I have had multiple appliances that broke because the digital controls shorted out. If they’d been hardware, they would have continued to work.
Maybe you get some fancy features out of it, but I prefer reliable, %99 of the time.
It reminds me of my first job working in tech. I was working for a lab at a hospital in Dallas. Patients’ records were kept on two Digital VAX mainframes from the 1970s. This was the mid 1990s and I didn’t understand why we were using such old tech. I had been told that it was the same type of mainframes that NASA was using, but didn’t really tell me anything.
I finally asked. My boss, a guy named Nelson, told me it’d be easier to show me than tell me. I followed him into the server room where he pointed out “The Books”. Imagine a chorus of angels singing a single joyous note as someone says “The Books” and you’ll have a close approximation of the way he spoke of them.
“The Books” were binders. Standard 8.5” x 11” paper, 3 or 4 inches thick in a row, on a shelf, that was about 30 feet long. They continued on the shelf below, for about 28 of the same 30 feet. Below that were the rack modems (we had 200 of them and they ran at 2400 BPS even though the current speed was 56.6K – I found out later that it was because we were transmitting small amounts of text, often over long-distance or over incoming calls to the 800#, which we paid for by the minute. Even though a 2400 BPS modem transmitted much more slowly, it went through its handshake with the modem on the other end in a fraction of the time. The handshake and transmission at 2400 BPS took less time than the handshake and transmission at 56.6K – one of the many things I learned that challenged what I thought I knew as a new tech),
Nelson pointed at the books and asked me if I’d ever looked at them. I allowed that I hadn’t and asked what they were.
In those books were every single glitch, bug and error message that had been documented in the 25 years that Digital VAX mainframes had been in operation. There was extensive information on identifying the cause, notes for different software releases and patches, hardware variations, known issues with multiple hard drive arrays vs. magnetic tape.
All the accumulated documented problems of over two decades from hundreds (maybe thousands) of DEC Servers all over the world.
And the known fixes for all of them.
After all that time, anything that was likely to break with these servers had probably broken somewhere, at some time and been fixed.
And documented.
In “The Books”.
Even though these machines were operating on a few kilobytes of memory (my computer at home had 32 megs, at that time) they were a text environment and anything that might go wrong could be fixed quickly and easily. NASA had a similar setup (I don’t know what they have now).
Hospitals and NASA could do what needed to be done with very little processing power. Faster computers would be completely useless, no matter how fast they were, if a bug shut down critical functionality at the wrong time.
I’ve always remembered that and applied that thinking to the computers I build, appliances I buy and the things I make. It’s a useful lesson.
It’s especially powerful when combined with the lesson that I re-learned today: things aren’t always as complicated as you think they’re going to be. Check them out before you decide they’re going to be too much trouble, or too expensive.
If you happen to need an inexpensive and easy to program key fob for a Ford, Lincoln or Mercury, this is the one I bought.
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