 The best kind of doors are the doors you have to explain. Welcome, welcome to Unhinged with the DoorDork where today we do have a very special guest, Mr. Daniel Gills. I don't know if you're ready for this one. This one actually might bring up some conversations. We'll see how this goes. Cool. Are those the counting blocks? Yes. I have to say, I got a couple leftover from our eight month old. Yeah. Yeah, like the official elementary school counting blocks, that's the 10 block, right? You got all the one blocks, the five blocks, the 10 blocks, and then you got the hundred blocks, and then the 1,000 cube, and that's how I learned that. We keep counting. My daughter likes to count just like, you know, one, two, three, she likes to just see how far she can count. And I keep thinking about getting one of these sets because I want her to understand, you know, one is, you know, 10 is 10 ones and 100 is 10 tens. I can't think of a better way to show her than these sets. Have your kids watched number blocks yet? No. Okay, number blocks taught my kids math. 100%, I'm not a math guy. And they are literally little math geniuses because they took the principles they learned from number blocks. This is going to be like a promo for number blocks. Number blocks, Netflix, let me know if you need a sponsor. No, I'm just kidding. Oh. That's how my daughter's at that age. She'll just chat, GPT it. Yeah, I guess that's going to be the future. You ask your phone to look up on AI and it's all going to be there. Well, they could have asked for help with the collars there. It looks like somebody probably purchased a couple of those, tried a couple to make it fit and settled on the solution there. Yeah, good. I wonder if they went from an old like either a five pin or a six pin to even a seven pin system and just decided to slap on a new tailpiece and collar and call it good. Good as gold. So there might be a little context here that I need to give. That being a number block counting system, what kind of door do you think this might be? I'd imagine it's from an education facility or daycare. Yes, it's from an elementary school and this is a classroom door. So then you put your security hat on here, especially with all of the emphasis on classroom security these days, barricade devices. That's not the intended use of that but it certainly could prevent a door from latching properly in case of emergency. Much, much better, smarter ways to protect classrooms. Yes, no. And ensure that they latch properly. Yeah, I agree. Better ways to secure classrooms. I'm going on, I'm airing on the side of security for this. Yeah, so they do use this for security purposes in the case of they need to do a lockdown drill or in real life, what the teacher's supposed to do is just open up the door, slide this out and close the door. So this is normally open, which I get in a classroom setting, makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways and the door should automatically lock once it's in that closed position. So I'm guessing it's either a storeroom or a classroom function where they've kept it in the locked position. So yeah, but there's definitely much better ways to make that happen. And from a fire code and life safety side of things, that's not compliant. Like if it's a classroom door, it's going to be fire rated to a certain extent. It's probably a 20 minute door. But even then it's supposed to be in a latched position while in operation. So that's why so many teachers use the door stops, right? To hold their door open. They're not supposed to be holding their door open. That door should be closing for a reason, right? Closing self-latching, smarter ways to do it. Last spring we saw a lot of teachers will even put just magnets or tape over their strike. And you wouldn't know as a passerby, right? Like at least this is obvious that it's not latched, but they're putting anything and everything over that latch so that, especially when they have a classroom function that they cannot unlock during regular classroom hours. Number one, so that kids can go to the bathroom and get back in. But number two, that they can then remove that thing and then ensure that it is latched in an intruder situation. So there's a larger conversation that has to happen. I don't think this is the venue before it. And it's also district by district, right? Because we can't tell the districts what they should be using. We can just recommend functions for them. It's true. And every district's going to have a different policy or procedure and how they want to handle it. Yeah. I thought I'd throw this out there. Thought it was eye-catching at least, spark a conversation. Could be really knocking bad. Could be not that knocking bad. I would say 99.9% of the time, it's probably not that bad, but that 0.1% or 0.1%, I don't know how many nines I said. Could be extremely bad. It wasn't resolved or taken care of. And who's to say, if there was an intruder, let's say something happened, someone got into the building. Who's to say that teacher's going to know whether that door should be locked or not? Like that could just let the intruder in if they didn't have the time to respond. Hopefully they have some kind of alarm system set up to where someone does get into the building, they see something, they can alert and lockdown system to get into play. But this was proposed as a solution for lockdown drills. So... Well, my score with that would probably be a six. And because I'm glad that there's conversations and support around how door hardware plays into lockdown drills. Obviously it's a critical component of it, but there's better ways to do it. So reach out to anyone at your local door hardware companies, whether it's a distributor or a manufacturer, and all of us can teach you better ways to do this. I agree. I'm not going to give it a knocking score because this is such a complex issue, but I will echo what Daniel said in that there are lots of professionals that can educate you around the situation because I think knowledge is probably the thing that's most lacking in these situations. And the lock is the thing that's going to keep you the most safe. Just the lock, that's a functioning lock. So that's why I'm going to leave this one. Well, now do I give it a knocking score or not? I don't know. Up to you. I feel like I still have to give this a knocking score. So I'm going to go with it, that 0.01% of the time, like it's a 10 in my book, that other 99.9% of the time, it's not that bad. Maybe like a two or three, like in reality. But that being said, I'm glad, like Daniel said, they're having that conversation. They're at least practicing lockdown drills, which I think is fantastic. Everyone should be going through that in your school and they're bringing up the conversation. And hopefully this is just a temporary solution until they figure out their hardware side of things. So yes, reach out to a professional near you. We would love to help you out. We even have a two part PSA series for teachers and classroom safety. Yeah, maybe you can link that or something. Check out our playlist. I have a playlist, I'll link it below. Also, potentially you're exposing yourself to remove this block. I know it's an in swinging door and it's not as much of an issue as if it was an out swinging door and you're actually putting yourself out there, but still could be some trouble. Okay, on that, let's continue. Are you ready? The final door, I really don't even remember this, so we'll see. Oh, actually I remember it. I feel like the Kool-Aid man reference comes up so many times. Oh, yeah. And that was all I could think about, although this would be a really, you don't really need to be the Kool-Aid man for this situation, but. Oh yeah, anyone could fall down those stairs. Is it down or up? Is this out of home alone? No, you would think it would be something. Ever the Callister do this? I have a lot of questions. I'm gonna go with it's a work in progress on this one. I think they're trying to do the right thing. Assume good intent, right? But wow. This is an older historic building and so I could understand how they would might want to do some remodeling. Yeah, this is scary when I was following the path of egress. So I'm like, hey, let's check out how we would exit in the case of emergency. You know, like normal door hardware nerds do when you enter a building. You're like, hey, let's go make sure we can exit this building safely and come across this. Obstructions sitting on the floor, not sure what's behind the canvas, the plastic wrap they've got there. There's that lead down to the actual exit. So imagine the lights go out. Yeah, go quickly, you won't, you probably trip. Good thing is you've got that lovely durable painter's tape holding that plastic on. That's for sure gonna slow you down. And then you just tumble right down. That's, yeah, that won't be an issue. I feel like it is something out of Home Alone where you get wrapped up in the plastic, you trip over the stanchion and then you fall out the door and then there's a highway right outside the door as well. So bam, you get hit by a truck or something. And Kevin McAllister's just standing there smiling at you. Yeah, my boys love Home Alone. That's their like favorite movie of all time. And I still catch them every once in a while, like whispering to each other, let's put marbles underneath the welcome mat. Let's, I'm like, no, do not do that. A lot of life safety lessons can be learned from watching Home Alone and applying it to everyday life. Yeah, Benji, this one's bad. Could be pretty dangerous in the right scenario. Did you peek behind the curtain? I did not, but you can see through, I went to the curtain and it does lead to a double door with a mullion. At least they had the mullion, but that's a highway that right there as well. So it's not only that, this is your path of egress, but if you're running out and not paying attention, I don't know, something's gonna come by and clip, yeah. Oh man. Don't be first, don't be last, I guess, is what you're saying there, Benji. It's somewhere in the middle, right? Well, this one to me, that's a 10. That's pathetic. Now, I get, if it's, you know, construction zone, but you gotta take that into account with your signage with how you're routing traffic, what your emergency egress plan is during construction, but that looks like a poorly executed hack job. I guess it's probably the best term I can come up with. I wonder because there's stairs, maybe they're looking to add a ramp or make this more accessible in some way or another. So maybe they've got great intentions, but- And good intentions. Yes, I'm with you, Daniel. I think this is up there. Especially that plastic, even if you got it down and got everything out of the way, you're gonna slip on it. It's gonna be like a banana peel in Mario Kart. You're just down the stairs. The flooring on there is like a gravel flooring. So if it's wet or something like that, like you're just gonna be slipping and sliding all over the place. It's not good. Better ways to do it. The historic hardware on this historical building is actually really old sergeant stuff though. So I got some other cool pictures from this building, but this one was a scarier one. Well, we can come back and modernize it, right? Yes, right? Benji, those are good ones. I'm always impressed at just how many applications you get. You must get flooded with these. I get sent a lot. I look for a lot. And then I happen to stumble upon. I don't know if it's like the door gods are just sending these photos to me in somewhere or another, but basically every time I go out, if you look hard enough, you can find something wrong with some doors, right? And I think I just keep my eye out for it. Well, and as you do well, it's all about education and awareness. We all see these every day. If you see something, say something. That's why we do this, right? It's the spread awareness, right? The good education for the door hardware industry. Life saving. Cool. All right. I feel like ending on a 10 also. That's a downer as well. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. I appreciate your insight and your thoughts on these three challenging openings. Thanks again for being here and love hearing about your fun fact. And it started off on a door hardware nerd foot, right? That's the right way to do it. So thanks for joining us. Well, thanks for having me. And thanks for all both of you are doing for the industry and frankly, the general public to bring awareness to everyday things that most people just overlook. Doors are important. Make sure you 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 doorhardwinners.com or leave a comment down below. Thanks for watching. Bye, thank you.