Stupid solutions...

In a word, perception. The people making the decisions perceive that this is accomplishing something. They perceive the padlock as a visible sign of strength.

I think it's got to do with what your ancestors used to use.

Sheer ignorance, and stupidity, their everywhere !

DEPENDING on the PHJ, they just broke a few laws- life safety and fire code regs are a possibility..

--Shiva--

They are ?

Well, one of the rooms I'm thinking of has another, exterior door with a crash bar, with the padlocked door going to another room. The other, OTOH, is a farly well-used storage room with no other exits.

yes they are !

g'day

That's probably the point of the exercise. Someone needed a quick low-budget way to turn a door semi-permanantly into a wall, and slapped a hasp onto it as a low-budget single-cylinder surface-mount lock. "This is not a door. Really. If you have to ask, don't; just go around."

Then, to regain control of that, they swapped in padlocks that participate in their keying system.

Of course it's obscene. But if it did what they needed at the time, and

*IF* it was used in a situation where the PJH doesn't consider it a safety hazard, I'm not completely sure they were wrong.

Yes, it has abuse hazards, but there are ways to manage them; I've had to deal with this in one building. If you snap the padlock back onto the hasp while the door is open, nobody without a key is going to lock you in unless they bring another lock... and if they're going that far, you're probably in trouble anyway, as anyone who has ever been pennied into their dorm room can attest.

Again: I don't approve. But I'd have to know which problem they thought they were solving before I could decide whether I thought it was stupid, shortsighted, or just sloppy.

When I was young, typical shop security was a nightlatch (or possibly a dropbolt) and padlock on the shop door. The hasps and padlocks generally were not that strong, but presumably it allowed shopkeepers to re-key by just getting a new padlock. This came in handy one day when a burglar got into various shopkeepers houses in the street where I lived and extracted their trousers using a stick with barbed wire wrapped on the end (people never bothered locking garage doors or the 'internal access' doors). He got both their wallets and their shop keys. A posh department store in Auckland had lovely cedar doors locked with large brass hasps and bronze Yale padlocks (the doors have been since replaced by automatic doors when air conditioning was installed).

There were security problems at the local problems as various illegal cell keys existed, and presumably re-keying considered too costly and a waste of time in any case. The authorities added hasps and padlocks to the maximum security cells (only about 20 maximum security cells were needed for the whole country at the time) and swapped padlocks daily. They also put changeable locks on passage and connecting doors and swapped them daily. I do not know if they used 'Best' or similar, or just a bit key lock that could be easily removed from its mortise.

This came in handy one day

Peter:

That reminds me of an Indonesian story about thieves using fishing poles to appropriate the excess belongings of tourists in hotels.

Regards,

Edward Hennessey