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Holding Doors Open
October 12th, 2006 at 00:47
My workplace is a bit of a maze of corridors in some places- and the entrances and the exits are like a fortress, requiring a combination of RFID cards, keycodes and Iris scanning. This has raised some interesting (ie: tedious) questions that keep me awake at night.
As people are always moving around the building, you’ll find the doors in regular use- obviously its good ettiquette to hold doors open for people, but at what distance does it become acceptable to let the door swing closed? I think I’m quite liberal when it comes to awkwardly standing in a door way, partially blocking it whilst trying to hold it open in an attempt to appear polite and friendly- I’ll hold it open for people within say, five metres or so.
The trouble is that if you factor in the speed of the person who is walking, this opens up a whole new dimension of complexity. If they’re walking too slowly it looks ridiculous that I’m holding the door for so long, and its embarassing for both parties – when the lumbering slowcoach finally arrives at the door, they’re sort of obliged to do a stilted bemused noise- not a laugh, that’d be over the top, and say thanks in a way that sounds like they’re trying to hard to be grateful, as afterall, you’ve been holding the door for what feels like a lifetime.
This is usually unavoidable too- it isn’t socially acceptible to pull out a calculaor and start plugging numbers into the formulas of motion. Writing about it on the internet is fine, though.
This problem is multiplied when you consider that there could be a lot of doorways in close proximity, and the person behind you might be going the same way. It feels faintly ridiculous sometimes when ‘conversation’ consists of the other person say “Thanks…. thanks… thanks…. thanks…” as you walk through multiple doors.
There’s more questions too- does the “critical distance” (as I’m going to coin as meaning the distance in which you will wait and hold the door) change based on whether the door you’re holding has any sort of time consuming security locks? I’d expect the critical distance would increase. Does your level of acquaintance with the person walking towards the door factor at all? Could the critical distance reveal how much I like someone to a casual observer? I mean, I’d make a point of slamming it in the face of Nigel Farage, but I might wait longer if Adam Hart-Davis wanted to get into my workplace. Can any mathematically minded blog readers propose a formula for calculating the critical distance?
Yeah, its things like this that keep me awake at night. This and nightmares about rollerskating.
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