Our recently concluded Van Contest — winners to be unveiled soon — had great response. It’s been fun to look at all the eye-catching wraps to trucks, vans and, in a couple of cases, vehicles that never were intended to be workshops but now are.

I’ve been particularly interested in “peering behind the curtain” and seeing how locksmiths set up their workspaces inside.

My workspace never would win any contests. My tendency is to litter every desk I’ve ever had with unrelated items, so the sticky notes and desk calendars that are essential to my work are intermixed with industry tchotchkes, baseball memorabilia and — at this time of year — Christmas decorations.

That said, I know where everything that I want for my work is located — even if it’s underneath something else. It’s actually well-organized, but it won’t win any contests. Among the sundry items are two cups of pens and pencils. When I get a new one from ALOA or something, I just stuff it in one of the open spots.

What do locksmiths do when they get a new piece of equipment? It’s not as though they can stuff a new exit device into the exit devices barrel in their work truck. No, they have to make decisions about what to carry, lest their work truck start to look like Oscar the Grouch’s RV — or my desk.

Such decisions must be addressed constantly, because progress is relentless. There’s no point where the security industry is going to survey the landscape and call it a day: “Everyone has all the products they’ll ever want. All we have to do is just keep making the same thing over and over.”

That’s obvious if you take a look at our December issue, in which we look back at what we and our readers thought were the best new products of the past year. These are only a small portion of the new products that were released in 2022 that locksmiths had to make space for.

In the January 2023 issue, we introduce a different type of feature. It’s a look ahead at what participating manufacturers believe will be the important products for security pros during the coming year.

We left it up to the manufacturers to decide which of their products would be most important to the locksmith trade in 2023, and you’ll be familiar with a few of them. Others, however, you might not have heard of before. That’s because they aren’t on the market yet.

A few manufacturers chose to highlight coming attractions. Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but I would expect that you’ll see some of these in our December 2023 issue.

We can’t tell you more about them yet, because January still is in the future as of this writing. In due course, you’ll know all about them. And then you’ll have to figure out where they’ll go in your work truck.

That’s the price of progress.

— Will Christensen