Friday, October 14, 2011

Placement Is Key

At the office building I frequently work at, the restroom doors are all on hydraulic openers. Several paces from each such door, is a pressure plate you smack to activate the doors (they look just like the ones you see at hospitals for their big, swinging automated doors).

I will admit that I tend to walk faster, from place to place, than a lot of people do. I'm fairly no-nonsense when I'm going places. I want to get from point A to point B as directly and quickly as possible. So, I frequently find myself having to wait whenever I encounter automated doors.

This week, some of the bathroom doors at work had signs on them saying something to the effect of "automatic door: do not manually open". Well, that's fine in theory. However, if you don't want me yanking the door open, you need to make sure that, by the time I reach the door after hitting the pressure plate, the door is open far enough for me to pass through it. The bathroom doors at work just don't manage that "trick".
Seriously: if an automated door opens slower than a bank vault, and you don't want people manually opening it, set the activator button further from the door!