I forgot my padlock combination, the night before departure

The night before I was due to leave, I emptied the bag onto the bed to repack it properly, something I never do, and that the past month had put me in the mood to do.

At the end, I went to lock the padlock back onto the zipper. Three dials, three digits. I’d set it months earlier, at a time when I was sure I’d remember, with a combination chosen specifically because it was unforgettable.

Nothing. Not a memory, not a hunch, not even a toss-up between two numbers. A complete blank.

What I did

What anyone would do. I started at zero zero zero and worked my way up.

A three-dial padlock has a thousand combinations. Sitting cross-legged on a bed, with a podcast in your ears, you can get through about twenty-five a minute once your hand finds the rhythm. The math is immediate, and it’s depressing.

It opened after about forty minutes. I didn’t even have to go all the way through, which is the only lucky break in this story.

Forty minutes. From someone who wasn’t trying to force it, had no tools, and was bored.

What I found out next

This is the part that actually bothered me, and it has nothing to do with my memory.

Padlocks in this family are certified for security screening, which means one specific thing: authorized agents have to be able to open them without destroying them. That requires master keys, and every lock type carries a code.

These keys are sold openly. Listed by their code, individually, on the very same catalogue that sells the padlocks, right next to the padlocks. This isn’t a secret leaked on some obscure forum, it’s a listing for sale online, with a product page and a delivery estimate.

I won’t go into more detail, that’s not the point, and I have no interest in writing an instruction manual. The fact is enough: the object can be opened effortlessly by anyone willing to pay the price of a sandwich, and that’s by design, not a manufacturing flaw.

So what does it actually protect against

There’s one answer left, and it’s an honest one.

The padlock stops a zipper from working itself open under pressure, in the hold or a luggage rack. It also adds a few seconds for an opportunistic hand, and those few seconds aren’t nothing: whoever went through my bag on a January train spent four seconds in it, and probably wouldn’t have pushed further.

That’s it. It’s not nothing, and it’s not what the listing sells you.

The section’s filter

Four conditions, all four mandatory.

• It fits in a forty-litre bag. Yes.
• It clears cabin security. Yes.
• It costs under about fifty euros. Yes.
• It’s objectively ridiculous and it solves a real problem. Ridiculous, yes. Real, barely, and that’s the whole point.

Verdict: no. The first no of this section, and it had to happen at some point: a site that never advises against a purchase has no judgment worth trusting.

These questions stay open because I’m not buying four padlocks to test one, and the method is in what I don’t test.

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The next morning, I left the padlock in the room’s drawer, with a note saying it was open and that the combination was the one written on it. I never replaced it. What still bugs me, six months later, is having spent forty minutes opening an object I’d bought to prevent exactly that.