Dear people who work in my building,

Use the bloody revolving door. You know, the one that’s beside the regular door you always use? Yeah, that one, the one with the “Please use revolving door” sign on it. I know, it’s really difficult to work. You have to push AND walk and somehow not trip or trap your face in the door.

Admittedly, this is a stupid thing for me to get so pet peeve-y about, but there’s very simple reasons to use the revolving door. You know how when you open the regular door to the building and there’s that whooooooosh of air that messes up your hair? We don’t want that. It’s bad.

That whoooooosh is caused by the difference in air pressure between inside the building and outside the building. Inside, we have climate controlled warm air. It’s maintained at a particular temperature, and the building uses magical elves to keep the temperature even. The building itself is pressurized. I don’t know why, but it is. Presumably they have a reason.

A revolving door maintains a perfect seal on the building while still allowing people in and out. At no time in your pushing your way through the door is that seal broken. In other words, air stays pressurized. This is a good thing. Without that seal, air rushes from high pressure to low pressure. This means that we spit out a bunch of warm air and we suck in a bunch of cool air. We waste energy heating that air. It’s dumb.¬† As my loving parents used to tell me as a kid, we aren’t paying to heat the whole country.

I’m not saying that if we use revolving doors we end the greenhouse effect, but it’s definitely a needless waste of energy to heat air that we then release into the great outdoors.

Jim