Real Physical Security

A consultant was called out to look at a company's problematic database server hardware.

In the middle of the night prior to the consultant's arrival, there was a power blackout that lasted for fifteen minutes. Switches, routers and servers were protected by UPS, but this power blackout had somehow caused the fingerprint reader attached to the server room door to freak out and stop working.

The consultant had made his appointment to meet with the company's systems administrator early in the morning. When the consultant met with the sysadmin, the contact explained that the fingerprint reader could be fixed by resetting using a special key that was kept in one of the company's safes. Unfortunately one of the two people who had the combination to the safe was away sick and the other was away until mid afternoon attending an important meeting with a client.

With no obvious way into the server room to examine the problematic database server hardware, the consultant asked if he should come back tomorrow when the server room door issue was resolved.

"Oh no, it won't be too much of a problem" the sysadmin told him, "as a safety feature, the door can be opened from the inside even when the lock isn't working"
The consultant thought about pointing out that they were on the outside, not the inside, but held his tounge.
The sysadmin took the consultant to the server room door and told him to wait. The sysadmin then walked down the hallway, opened a door, and pulled a stepladder out of the cupboard. He came back up the hallway, put the stepladder next to the server room door and climbed up to the roof. The sysadmin carefully shifted aside some the roof tiles. He then climbed further up into the space between the roof tiles and the actual roof and moved some more tiles around. The consultant watched him climb fully into the roof space and then a few moments later there was a loud thump. A moment after that the server room door opened, banging against the stepladder. The consultant removed it.

"Whenever we can't get in, we just get someone to jump through the roof. That's why we keep the stepladder in that closet!"