Funny story of my youth: When the first payphones with digital terminal were introduced, I found that you could access the operator menu, that was password protected. For months I checked different combinations of those 5 secret numbers at different terminals after school, in a sequential order. One day I was in.
Inside the operator menu you could check how much money there was inside the machine, you could make free calls, but you could not take the money out. I never managed to take the money out without violence.
So I signed a mobile phone contract that gave you some call minutes the more calls you received (it was a hit back then, I think from Vodafone), and called myself repeatedly from phone to phone.
I once had a storage unit, and lost the key to the padlock. The manager said no problem, and we went to the unit. He pulled out a battery operated angle grinder, and cut through the hasp in a few seconds.
This reminds me of storing equipment and supplies at the platoon level in the Army. The Army owns a huge number of shipping containers, like they're pervasive on any Army base, just part of the landscape. Basically every platoon keeps most of its stuff in these containers instead of proper buildings (minus weapons and ammunition, unless deployed somewhere, and then the shipping containers become arms rooms too). It also just makes it easier to deploy all the stuff, because it's already loaded up to go. Anyway, they're all "secured" with padlocks. Because of personnel turnover and poor bookkeeping, the right keys always seemed to be missing, so every platoon also had a set of bolt cutters. The padlocks were constantly being chopped off whenever people needed to look for things, conduct an inventory, etc. and then replaced with new padlocks. Taking a step back, it was crazy and didn't instill much confidence.
I saw one city park where they took this one step farther. They had a small wooden structure (I think the cover to a water valve, from years ago when they used to set up an ice skating rink). The open it so rarely they don't even padlock it - they just bend open an S shaped link of chain, put that where the lock would go, and bend it shut. When someone needs to access it, they cut the one link of chain with a pair of bolt cutters, and then put on a new one.
Back in the day, on Navy ships it was a punishable offense for anyone to have bolt cutters except for the master-at-arms people (the ship's internal police force), because everyone used padlocks on their personal lockers and also on a lot of gear lockers.
The keys oh god the keys. Adding to this the hatches on armored vehicles are also padlocked (sincgar radios stayed in the vehicle). Keeping track of the keys was always a massive pita. A lot of privates did a lot of push ups over misplaced keys.
Back during college, we found an abandoned one in a massive pile of junk in the basement of one of the research buildings. It was already opened up, but out of curiosity we poked around how it worked, and ended up fabricating a key to open the change drawer - it was just a cross shape, nothing special that even looked key-like.
Those bastards are tough. We whacked on it for an hour, with a 15-lb sledgehammer.
When it finally broke open, it yielded about $1.50.