#4 "The Door"

If you are a computer science student at Furman or have spent any time in the second floor of the Riley academic building, then you know this door. This door has seen better times, but it is currently in the doldrums. It personally might be the most frustrating thing on Furman's campus currently. The main problem with this door is that it does not close easily by itself. This does not seem like a big problem, but it is since this door is supposed to always remain closed. When it remains open for more than about a minute, an extremely annoying siren goes off. This siren always scares me and catches me off guard when I am in the lab.

The problem must lie in the door handle mechanism. The part on the side of the door that goes into the door frame and moves when I turn the handle is what I will call the latch. This latch gets caught on the door frame's corresponding part. This causes the door to be propped open, and then the alarming siren goes off until someone hurriedly shuts the door in annoyance. The problem seems to be that this latch cannot smoothly slide into its proper spot within the door frame. If the friction could be reduced or the latch somehow built so so these parts slide past each other more easily, then the door would close more fluidly. It seems that this latch is backwards as shown in the picture below. Most doors I have seen have the bigger curve of the latch making contact with the door frame while closing, but this door seems to have the latch set up so it cups the door frame in a sense as it closes. I am not a door engineer, but I would assume that a door intended to remain closed would close very easily.

I have two additional comments about the door, one bad and one good. I wish there was a bigger window on the door. The window on the door is only an inch wide, so a person can barely see into the lab. It would be cool if there was a bigger window, so people could see the awesome computer lab we have here at Furman. There is one part of the door that I love though, the card reader. Card access is required for entry into the lab. I just recently found out that I do not have to swipe my card but can simply pass the card over the swiper. I found out even more recently that I do not even have to take the card out of my wallet but can simply pass wallet over card reader. This is awesomely convenient, and I feel really cool whenever I do this.