Creative solutions

The inside door hasn’t been working for quite some time. Or rather, when you press the button to open it using the handicap switch, it shudders, but doesn’t open. This seems to drive little children crazy on the weekends — they push and push the button and nothing happens.
Now while I personally like people to use the nano amount of calories that it takes to actually push open a door, we do have these devices for people who are not able to open doors. We like to have them working.
So today, when our repair guy Steve was in on a different matter (parking issues — but that’s another story), I asked him if he could take a look at it. He did, but said, “It’s a steel door. I can’t do steel doors. If it was wood, I could plane it.” He and Bruce thought it was something to do with the mechanism, which was also beyond his area of expertise. I kept looking at the door, and looking at the scraping marks on the door jamb, and I really thought that it just was a friction problem.
This being a theatre school, we don’t have a ready supply of 3 in 1 oil. But we do have a ton of vaseline. For making masks with, for getting makeup off. So I smeared vaseline on the door jamb and voila! It now opens smoothly, with the touch of a button.
And who says being an arts administrator isn’t a creative job!