Someone complaining about a door repair mini-rant in the Pit reminded me of this jaw dropper.
A little background for those of you who aren’t aware. I work in a hospital and I have frequent cause to comment to my supervisor that I only come in to work to see what happens next. Here’s what happened “next” last week.
We contract food services and housekeeping and probably a few other support functions. Therefore they all maintain an office onsite for their administrative people. One day last week all of the admin types had left for the day while some of the minions had worked late. Minions get ready to go home and go to get their purses/car keys personal stuff from the office. It’s lock. Happens frequently, no problem, call security with master key. Cletus P. Coultrain arrives to save the day and somehow manages to extract the lock core from the handle. Normally this takes a special key but sometimes it just happens. Again, no problem under normal circumstances, call locksmith person with plant ops. Now the problem, locksmith person is unreachable and no one else has a clue where the tools are or how to use them if they did. Bigger problem. Minions car keys etc are still locked up and they really don’t want to stay there all night.
Have no fear! Super Maintenance Man is here!
A little more background. Hospitals, ours at least, are well constructed. The doors are effectively two inch slabs of concrete with a pretty veneer on them. Weigh a couple hundred pounds and cost about a thousand bux. The locksets run close to 500 dollah. Steel doorframe. All in all, designed not to be casually compromised.
Back to the story… Super Maintenance Man takes the wonder drill from his utility belt and drills holes through the door all the way around the lockset (body of which is about 6 inches by 8) and then beats it out of the door with the wonder sledgehammer. Door opens. Minions get keys and go home to warm beds. Super Maintenance Man is hero of the day.
All total costs? somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 dollars when you account for the labor of replacing the door the next day.
This bank vault door is mounted in a standard wall. Two layers of sheetrock on a metal stud structure. Effort to punch through two layers of sheetrock and open the door from the inside? Zero. Cost to repair two hole in sheetrock? Maybe two hundred.
Ah, I also wondered where the bank vault came into the story, but it was very late at night here when I read it, so I just thought it was me being easily confused.
Now I see I am not the only one.
Oh, if you want another random act of stupidity, my own one involves going to throw the rubbish down the rubbish chute in my block, and cleverly throwing my keys away with it. There followed a cold and boring wait for a locksmith, and I felt pretty stupid.
Sorry for the confusion. No vault. Only a door to an office suitable for a bank vault mounted in a wall that someone can punch through with their fist.
Aha! OK, gotcha now. On re-reading, I see that it was about 4.54 a.m. here when I read that, so please excuse the slowness. Bummer, just when I was beginning to think of taking up bank robbery as a career.
Actually, I have heard something similar about a bank robbery (long time ago, and no cite) where the story involved a similar obsessive degree of strong securitymostly, BUT with a weaker point, which the thieves did discover. I’m afraid that just made me somehow a bit impressed with the thieves and amused at the silliness of the bank and its security.
So, in other words, it’ll cost $2,000 to replace the half-ton door, but it’d have cost only $200 to fix a hole in the wall next to the door.
Two things come to mind. First, the single-mindedness of getting through the door because it is, after all, the one known point of entrance into the room. But second, you know what you’re getting into by drilling the door. You don’t know what’s behind that sheetrock. Maybe nothing. Maybe high-voltage electrical wires, high-pressure steam lines, water supply or drain pipes.
It does, on the other hand, point out the illusion of security that door provides. I’ve always been amused at the big, ornate doors on pricey houses; you know the ones, solid oak with triple locks and peepholes – surrounded by glass windows that may as well have “Break here to enter” stencilled on them.
I wonder, though, was the superdoor really for security, or more for fire protection? If the latter, the sheetrock was probably heavy-duty (a few millimeters thicker) and would be an effective fire retardant.
heheh, that’s why it’s better to live in a NON-pricey house with a good door, with triple lock and peephole, with no window anywhere near it. Or so I try to tell myself anyway. To be fair, I suppose the windows in question might be wired to a good alarm thingy.
However, perhaps those are the kind of pricey posh houses that also have one of those yellow boxes proclaiming “this here is a burglar alarm, you know, so evildoers, get thee hence” but when the alarm says on it a maker’s name like Tandy or Radio Shack, it probably works as a sign saying “look, any nice electrical toys in this house are of no value really, so don’t waste your time, burglar-man”.
Super Maintenance Man: No worries, I’ll simply put a hole in the wall right here next to this doorknob, and use my superpowers to reach through the wall to unlock the door!
