 The best kind of doors are the doors you have to explain. Welcome, welcome to Unhinged. Today we do have a very special guest, Mr. John Pauley. Last but not least, John, you ready? Like a root canal. Oh, oh my God. I'm sorry, I stopped at the toilet plunger. What in the world? Is there a button on the chaffing? I think that's an alarm. That might be a speaker. Okay. But why is the speaker there? Do not block back door. Why? Nobody wants to touch it. Alarm will sound if doors open. Are you sure? Like, did anybody test that? Like, oh. And that's your speech list. Benji, why? Why did you do that to us? It's not even a new toilet plunger. I mean, they didn't even clean it before they put it in it. That's used. You know, they use that for the bathroom and then come back and where they store the toilet plunger. And the only thing you can think of is that that toilet plunger fit that hole. But there's no exiting this door because as soon as you hit that, either one of two things, either the toilet plunger handle's gonna give or you're not. Like, you gotta hit that thing hard enough to snap that because, wow, where's the rest of the bar? Well, in order for the toilet plunger to fit, they had to take off the head of the chaff. Yeah, but they've got a key there to be able to unlock the emergency exit and to unlock the bar. So in theory, they should be able to dog it down if they wanted to, but somebody probably lost the key. This is the opposite of unauthorized dogging. And I don't know if we've ever seen one of those. Yeah, I can't tell if that's for dogging or for the alarm. Is that to turn off the alarm or is that? I don't know, but usually, you know how we see people put zip ties and all sorts of stuff around the rails to dog them. I don't know if we've seen the anti-dogging. The anti-dogging. Well, you will not dog this door. What's in there on the electrical conduit that's coming down? It looks like it's zip ties or a piece of cabling that I think at one point was used to hold the door shut. Because it looks like it was tied to the door. They do not want this door open for whatever reason, because at some point it was both zip tied shut hanging on the electrical conduit, because that's going to work great. Here, let's pull that open and, you know, just links 120-volt wires and it'll light you up. But then we've got this post that also has a toilet plunger attached to it. Which, how did you come up with that idea? I see this laying around. I wonder if this will fit. There's something behind that door that they do not want to release. I don't know. I have theories of ghost busters running around all of a sudden, but they don't need to worry about blocking the back door, because it's not opening. The other thing is they've got the sign up there, but did a mouse eat on top of that burn-she-exit bar? Because it looks like food stuff over the top of the bar. Like, I don't know what that is, but I'm a little scared. It's a little grimy. It's almost like they use the toilet plunger, you know, for its actual purpose, and then just like flung it back at the door and shoved it back in. I get that there's some cobwebs. I get that it's probably a warehouse door, all of that, but going back to your customer experience, right? The fact of, if somebody's coming this door, they're not going to go to that door, not only because, you know, it's got a toilet plunger on it, but the door looks gross. It looks nasty. Like, I wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole. What's the Grinch with the 18-and-a-half-inch pole? The handle that they have put on there, right, that they have previously tied to, I wonder if their closers not working and the handle is put on to close the door, or if they put it there to create that ligature. A secondary locking device. This one is it. We'll never know. I don't have a picture of the closure, but, you know, from the first picture to this one, at least they got their bar in the handle upright and the OCD is not killing me because it's actually level and it looks like it's upright on those. Somebody took a little bit of care on how they put those handles there, but is this a push-me-pull-you thing? Like, from Dr. Doolittle, because you pushed the emergency exit, but pull back on the other handle? I don't know. Like, there's something behind that door that they do not want to let out. This has got, like, retail written all over it. I feel like this has got to be people were breaking in or people were leaving the door propped open or something like that, and they wanted to restrict access, whether from the outside elements or the inside elements of, you know, people running out the back door or, you know, smoking when they're not supposed to or something like that. I feel like this has got to be some kind of retail environment and hopefully they get inspected fairly often from a fire marshal or AHA to make sure things are up to code. But again, going back to the experience, I think you talked a little bit about it. If your employees are using this door to take out the garbage, how do they feel like I don't want to take out the trash in the first place? But then secondly, I have to go through this to make it happen, like, ah. Part of me wants to say, could it be a warehouse door or something like that? At the same point, the signage is too colorful for a warehouse door. It even looks like there was a cleaning schedule or something that's been ripped out and the warning sign has a minion on it. Yeah. You know, I definitely think it's a retail door. And I think you're right. No one is going to want to go out this whether or not they should and probably that stuff on top of it was trash that was set on the door to try to open it up and somebody's trying to jimmy the thing open. So let's take a step back though, because as I look at this, maybe they're having problems with this door. Maybe the crash bar actually doesn't work. Maybe that's part of the problem is that without that little toilet plunger in there, maybe what's on the other side is just allowing the door to flop open and close. And so this is their homemade security system because the emergency exit bar isn't doing what it's supposed to do. And so we got to do something and this is what we figured out to do to keep the door locked. So somebody from the outside can't actually open and come in after hours. And if that's the case, the zip ties, somebody's already cut that or been broken into a couple of times because of that. So somebody's figured out that this door leads into some place they want to get to. I don't know. Well, there's a lot of things bad about it. I do want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe there's something wrong with this door in terms of the locking mechanism. But at that point, let's call somebody and figure out how to lock this versus let's shove a toilet plunger into it and hope for the best. Yeah. I think this would be a great opportunity to call a local, I don't know, locksmith or a technician of some sort, like an emergency call, pay the extra money, just have them come out and fix it, even if it's late at night or you got broken into. And I could see this maybe being like an overnight solution, but this looks like it's been here for a while. This is not an overnight solution. Yeah, you do that when it is an overnight solution. This has been there for months, if not years and you know, question how many toilet plungers have they gone through in the time period. But at this point, I also think it's worth a call to your age, Jay. It's worth a call to a locksmith, a door guy, a somebody who can evaluate this and say, something's not working here, we need to do that. From a life safety standpoint, I think you're a knockdown score. I think you're at a 10. From an aesthetic standpoint, I mean, if it didn't have the toilet plunger, maybe not a 10, but- I mean, it looks like- How did you come up with that? You found it on the shelf, I don't know. Hey, John, you're locking in with a 10. I am on that one, yeah. Man, would you- I can't disagree. It's a 10. It's a 10. And I think we've got a turkey because I'll give this a 10 as well. Life safety, you can't block the path of egress regardless of whether your building is occupied with customers or just your retail employees after hours. This is still an emergency exit and needs to be accessible for people to leave without any instructions or any toilet plungers in the way. Like you shouldn't have to think twice about being able to escape if something is happening. So it's gotta be a 10. So, Vinja, I didn't see a credit to the photo somewhere. So is this one that you took? And did you make that phone call to the AHA? No, if I knew where this door was, I would hunt them down. I would find them. I've got a set of special skills that I'm not afraid to use. No, this was found from the depths of Reddit. I think it's interesting. Not a lot of folks, when you think of AHA, a lot of folks think of the fire marshal. But the owner is an AHA, right? They have the peso in this. Obviously the owner made a great decision to do this. The other AHA that I think may play a bigger part in this conversation over the fire marshal. And I know the fire marshal is your life safety king, but your insurance agent is your AHA. And I cannot imagine their displeasure and the number of zeros that they would add behind that policy if they walked in and saw this. Because that's really where change happens a lot of times, right? The fire alarms in the fire alarm industry, they're required by insurance companies. The fire marshal's inspect them and make sure that they're in right. But the reason that fire alarms are in buildings is because they're required by insurance policy. The insurance agents and policy makers are the ones that are dictating that cost and that coverage. And that's why you'll see change happen when compliance isn't met typically through an insurance. And we're even now seeing that through cyber as well and some of the other stuff is that, you know, I do some of the stuff with smart cities and unmanned infrastructure. You've got groups that are failing cyber audits that that's why they're putting in access control systems because the key locks didn't do what they needed it to do. They didn't have the cyber controls and the insurance company is what's driving that not your fire marshal. I mean, it's sad, but true. And it's all from a liability standpoint, right? Like they've got information that they don't want people access to. Think of your employees, right? Like they're an asset of your company, right? And right now you're putting them at risk. Not only if something did happen and they couldn't escape that could destroy a company, right? Like you guys knew about this issue but didn't do anything about it. I'm sorry, you're canceled. Like you're done. And I had to think that even in a fire like that plunger stick may be burned up but they're gonna look at it and go what's this pile of rubber on the floor or on the door? Like this looks like a toilet plunger head stuck to the door. Somebody's gonna look at that and go this doesn't belong here. That's not gonna be a real hard after disaster conversation. The owner of the business whether he or she is aware or not he needs to be made aware that this is going to endanger an employee and you need to find another locking solution. If that lock doesn't work, get it fixed. If that lock is no longer the lock that style doesn't do what you need to do figure out something else but you got to do something. This can't stay. I agree. And I wish I knew who and where this is at because I won't sleep tonight because of this one. So this has been fun. I didn't know what to expect. So yeah, I've enjoyed myself a glass quite a bit. Yeah, no, thanks John for joining us on the episode today. We really appreciate you taking the time out of your day and spending, I don't know, it's been an hour and a half now of chatting around but thank you again for joining us. Join us for the next episode of Unhinged. Our doors are always open partially because they're unhinged. If you want to be featured on a future episode of Unhinged or if you have a picture to submit you can email me at Mia at doorhardburners.com. Thanks for watching. Chris Wilson, that's for you.