Locked out at 2am.
We pick up anyway.

There's a particular kind of cold that sets in when the door clicks shut behind you and your keys are on the other side of it. Most people feel it once or twice in a life. A locksmith feels other people's version of it every day.

West Coast Mobile Locksmiths is a mobile shop — no storefront, no waiting room, just a van stocked with cylinders, blanks, deadbolts and the tools to open a door without wrecking it. The work runs from Burnaby across Vancouver, and the phone gets answered the same whether it's a Tuesday afternoon or a Saturday at 2am. The person who picks up is the person who shows up.

The calls are rarely planned. A door pulled shut with the keys still inside. A house just moved into, where nobody knows who else still has a key. A lost fob, a worn cylinder that's started to stick, a tenant moving out. The kind of thing you don't think about until it's the only thing you can think about — and then can't believe how quickly it's put right.

"A lock should keep the wrong people out and let you straight back in. If it doesn't, it isn't finished."

The first rule is rekey before replace. A surprising amount of the time you don't need new hardware at all — you need the cylinder rekeyed so the old keys stop working, the latch adjusted, a strike plate moved a quarter inch. We'll tell you which it is before any work starts, and tell you straight. In a city this size, a reputation is the whole business.

When a lock does need replacing, it gets done properly — the right grade for the door, keyed the way you want it, the deadbolt throwing full and clean into the strike. Then we check it locks first try, every try. That's the finish line: not opened, secured.

Lockouts and rekeys are most of the calendar — but the same trade covers the cylinders that turn, the keys that fit them and the deadbolts, knobs and panic hardware that secure the whole opening. Seized locks, lost keys, worn strikes, smart-lock installs: all of it is the locksmith's work, and a lot of it is a rekey or a repair, not a full replacement.