As a follow up, to previous posts, in which I'd mentioned a work outing to a "Panic room" I said I'd report back on how it went.
Yesterday was the day. I got placed on the team doing the "difficult" room, with 1 hour to escape. There were 4 others besides myself on the team. They split my team, 3 on one side, and 2 on the other. Team members on both sides were handcuffed to the walls.(I refused to be handcuffed... but I did hold onto the other end of the hand cuff, to simulate me being cuffed, and didn't let go until the key was recovered.) There was a sliding door down the center of the room, and 2 were on one side, and 3 on the other. The people in either half of the room had to work together, passing information in order to unlock a briefcase, and get the key and then following information to unlock the other handcuffs. (I keep a bobby pin in my wallet, that can be used to get out of cuffs.. It would have worked Just Fine.)
The entire process was basically just locating the codes to unlock padlocks, and then move onto the next lock. I did pick one of the locks... I could have picked more, but I didn't want to be a spoilsport for the others.
For one stage, there was a desktop computer that we were supposed to gain access to. Being that one of my areas of interest is computer security, I was able to unlock the computer without needing to recover the password from the clues. I locked it again and waited until we actually got the password in the way the game was designed.
At one point, there was a safe, and we needed to get the key in order to get something inside the safe. Upon seeing it, I knew I could bounce the safe and get inside in a couple of seconds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFkGfnefYqs
I abided by the way the game was meant to be played. At the end, there were two padlocks on the final door, and we had 6 minutes left. While three of the team worked at getting the codes for the lock, one of team members and I approached the locks. bruit forced the first one, and were going to do the second, but the other members thought they had the code. They had two possible codes for the lock. We tried the first, it didn't work, and then time was called. we "didn't escape"
The second possible code we had written down, was the correct code. I used it on the lock right as the staff member was coming in, so technically, I think I escaped.
If that code hadn't worked, it would have taken another 1-2 minutes to bruit force the second lock. We were very close. After we were done, the staff told us the room as a 15% completion rate.
One of the other issues we faced, is that the staff didn't understand how we were progressing, and when we tried to use a up 1 of our 7 hints, they gave us hints for steps we'd already completed.
I estimate that if I hadn't held back, I could have 'solved' and exited the room in about 15 minutes. If I however used any means at my disposal to get out of the room, I am positive I could have escaped in under 5 minutes.
(and that turned out to be way longer than intended. The part of my brain that handles posting to twitter is cringing.)
