I disagree, a tolerance of 2 in either direction directly implies that starting from the solution you can round all the numbers up by two or round them down by two and the lock will still open.
Edit: To follow up, the original claim in the article was: "20-45-35 will open a lock set to 22-44-33", or in other words, a combination off by "-2, +1, +2" will open the lock.
Cheap locks (like those used for middle school/high school lockers) have about as much variance as Eliezer claims. As horrifying as that may be.
I somehow missed the 33-44 transpose in the quote. That would indeed be a wide variance.