Swiss Cheese Security/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Ridiculously lax building security.

  • Straight: Alice, a fairly normal citizen with practically no official credentials, can simply walk into the employees-only areas of SecuriCorps by wandering through an unlocked back door.
  • Exaggerated: Literally none of the doors in SecuriCorps have locks on them except for the restrooms, none of the computers are password-protected, and no security guards, cameras, or infrared lasers are anywhere to be seen.
  • Justified: The community in the area is largely trustworthy, so the risk in cutting security costs is a low one.
  • Inverted: SecuriCorps's security is so impenetrable even the president can't get in.
  • Subverted: Alice goes for the back door of SecuriCorps, which is unlocked... and an alarm sounds.
    • Alternatively: Alice enters the SecuriCorps building with no trouble. Exiting, on the other hand, is nigh-unto-impossible.
  • Double Subverted: But not a single person comes to investigate the alarm, which shuts off after a few seconds. Alice shrugs her shoulders and continues.
  • Parodied: SecuriCorps's security is literally nothing but signs saying "DO NOT ENTER" and increasingly desperate variants thereof. ("Please, please, for the love of Pete do not enter! You're really not supposed to be here! What would your mother say if she saw you doing this?")
  • Deconstructed: A thief notices Alice's entry, and promptly waltzes past SecuriCorps's alleged security measures and steals all of its secrets, bankrupting the company within days.
  • Reconstructed: ???
  • Zig Zagged: Alice is able to enter SecuriCorps through an unlocked back door. A flashback shows that this was because a thief had recently tripped the alarm and broken the lock before being escorted off by the police. However, it turns out that this was the only barrier to entry; no further security is present as Alice makes her way to the board room. Cue cut to Bob, who is watching Alice through a sequence of hidden cameras, having disabled security to lure Alice into a trap. Suddenly, Alice wanders off camera, appearing in Bob's lair through a door that really should have been locked.
  • Averted: SecuriCorps has reasonable security.
  • Enforced: "We need Alice to get the secret documents, but no one will believe she could sneak by security. Oh well, maybe people won't notice..."
  • Lampshaded: "...Seriously? No alarms? No locks? No guards? What kind of security is this?"
  • Invoked: Alice, noticing how so little attention people seem to pay to security, goes from building to building stealing everything she can.
  • Defied: Bob goes out of his way to make sure that his security is tight, arranging audits to make sure that no one will be able to take advantage of this trope.
  • Discussed: "This isn't a movie, there's no way we can just waltz into SecuriCorps and talk to the CEO."
  • Conversed: "You know, you'd think the villain would spend some of the money in his vault on some locks and a Rent-A-Cop."

Shouldn't this door back to Swiss Cheese Security have a biometric handprint thingy, or at least a lock?

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