Have you ever seen one of these?

It’s called a security screw, or a one-way screw. It’s designed to be almost impossible to remove. Notice how a flat head screw driver will only turn it one way, to tighten it. That kind of reminds me of the crummy radio in my Jeep in which the volume is controlled by pressing on 1 of 2 buttons to lower or raise the volume… and the “lower” button does not work, so all I can do it turn it up… But I digress. Back to the security screws… “So what are they used for?”, you might ask. Next time you use a public restroom, look at the screws holding the stall door onto the stall walls. This is what you will see. This is the only place I have ever seen these used. And its a darn good thing, because we all know just how valuable those stall doors are. I can’t count how many times I’ve been using the restroom and eyed one of those stall doors and thought, “Boy I would do just about anything to get this door home. Darn those security screws!!!” I especially like the ones with all the nice artwork and poetry on them. And I imagine some just want the door for all the valuable information written on it, such as the phone #’s of those hard to reach people. And of course I pretty much always carry a screw driver into these public stalls just on the slim chance that they did not use the one-way screws… but sadly, they always do. But let me tell you, the first stall door I find with flat head screws is going to be mine! I’m still working on figuring out how to get it out of the building without being noticed. I don’t imagine it would fit in my shirt. I’ll figure out the extraction plan details later.

As great as these screws work on the stalls doors, I think I could envision maybe a few other uses for them in the future. Maybe use them to screw the hood ornaments onto cars, so we can cut down on all that gaudy necklace jewelry. Or use them to hold those expensive airbags in place on our cars since they have become such a hot commodity for thieves. Or maybe on the enclosures containing the valuable copper that thieves are stealing in droves lately. But then if we used them for those types of things, we may run out of them for the bathroom stall doors, which would clearly be a tragedy that we cannot afford to risk.