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I was working I contracting gig out in Iraq last year, and our office had a Big old Red Head Gunsafe in it, with and electronic lock. One of the Marines I was training had come in from out of town, and had a rifle and a pistol. In our area, he only needed one or the other, as there was almost zero threat of being engaged with small arms, so we locked his M16A4 up in our redhead gun safe. Well, a couple days later, we needed to get some paperwork out of the same, so we entered our combo, and were surprised to get an unfamiliar beep. We tried the combo over and over again. Waited a couple hours, and then a full day, hoping we'd entered it wrong too many times and that we just needed to give it time to reset. We started frantically sending e-mails to the manufacturer, and our rep stateside who purchased it, but due to the time difference and the fact that most people stateside don't work weekends (slackers), it was taking too long to get an answer to what was going on. The day the Marine needed to head back to where he belonged we decided we had to bring out the big guns. A couple cartons of smokes went to the engineers who the brought over some sort of plasma cutting torch. As we were struggling to move the Safe outside of our office, and email arrived, telling us that all we had to do was push the electronic combination pad up, pull it off, and replace the batteries. When you removed the batteries of this specific safe, it caused the safe to revert to the default combo, and ta-da, we were able to rescue the rifle without setting it on fire.

The moral of the story is to make sure that you can't reset the combo on your safe simply by removing the batteries, if you want to keep anyone besides the kids out.

I'm not sure if this was a feature of all safes, or just the particular series we had, or if the bug was fixed in the later models.