Part II — Asking for the room

You ask for the room by setting a single dial:

• open — no lock fitted; the worker is trusted.
• locked (the default) — the worker may only write on its own bench.
• locked + curtained — as above, and it also can't read the sensitive folders (passwords, keys) or peek at a neighbor's bench.

A nice safety touch: if you misspell the dial, the system stops and asks — it never quietly leaves the door open while pretending it's locked. And it refuses to hand you a "lock" for a kind of room it can't actually lock, rather than give you a fake one.