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There are situations where its hard to understand how even the non-verbal warnings didn't latch though. There's "no unauthorized personnel", and then there's "

There are situations where its hard to understand how even the non-verbal warnings didn't latch though. There's "no unauthorized personnel", and then there's "Fire door, alarm will sound". In college, i worked at a university recreation center, and the desk I worked at was about 15 feet from a fire door. It sat somewhat between the weight room and the men's locker room, so virtually all male customers walked past this specific, well marked, fire door during their visit. And about 2-3 times a week, while I was working, somebody would finish up their workout and just push that door open and walk out. And every time, they'd look thunderstruck that the alarm did in fact sound. I eventually dropped all pretense of understanding that they were on autopilot, and began commenting as I deactivated and reactivated the alarm AGAIN "I thought universities required students be able to read". Only one person ever got short with me over that, and all I had to do was point at the letters that were bigger than their head, directly at eye level, 18 inches from their face, while they pushed the door open.

QuantumYeti 3y ago
Sounds like you were upset that you had a job looking at a door, and took it out on people.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  It’s totally reasonable to scold people for using emergency exits (especially alarmed ones) without an emergency need. It also doesn’t make you a bad person or stupid to subconsciously miss signage. But you should be okay with a bit of scolding in that case.
  - QuantumYeti 3y ago
    It's not reasonable to scold strangers, especially if you're just some random employee.
    - vermilingua 3y ago
      Yes, it absolutely is reasonable to scold strangers for things like this, especially if you’re an employee who sees it happening regularly.
      - permo-w 3y ago
        scolding is broadly something you do to someone you see as beneath you. if you feel the need to scold strangers, you've probably got other issues
        kelnos 3y ago
        I think you have a definition for "scolding" outside the mainstream. You scold someone who has done something wrong and should know better. There need not be any judgment about the person's worth attached.
        permo-w 3y ago
        the definition of scolding is "angrily rebuking or reprimanding someone". in my understanding of human psychology, that is something people do not do to people they see as equals. more specifically it's a behaviour a person is extremely unlikely to participate in if they feel the other person has enough social, physical or economic capital to punish them for it.
        matheusmoreira 3y ago
        I see your point and you're definitely right about that. If you're going to publicly scold someone in front of their peers, you better be ready because it's going to personally insult them in very deep ways, to say nothing of their social standing. If you're scolding someone you should probably be a badass drill sergeant, literally made of muscle, many times their superior in rank and with enough balls and testosterone to unblinkingly look them in the eye while heaping abuse right at their faces without one shred of hesitation, so that the sheer audacity of it all shocks and intimidates them into total submission. And you would also do well to remember that at least one movie depicts exactly one such drill sergeant getting shot in the chest when a certain scoldee went postal over it.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Is there even a reason for an emergency exit to not be treated as a regular, auxiliary exit? I.e. not labeled as regular, but also not an issue if people use it.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      The reason is often the opposite: you don't want people coming in that door (maybe it's a limited-access building and you don't want to staff security/ID checker at more locations). Sure, you can lock it from the outside, but if people are regularly leaving from that door, randos outside are going to sneak in before the door shuts.
    - petsfed 3y ago
      If the facility has any need to control access, they need to be more aggressive than just one way doors, since fire-code compliant one-way doors are trivially defeated with a doorstop.
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      > Is there even a reason for an emergency exit to not be treated as a regular, auxiliary exit? Absolutely, ex: 1. When that exit may be used as an entrance to a prohibited or fee-only area. Someone inside opens the latch for people waiting outside, either intentionally or accidentally, allowing them to enter without being noticed. 2. To supplement other things which may trigger an alarm, or for situations that can't be detected in a simple standard automated way. (E.g. violence, unusual chemical spill, wild animal.) It also means you don't need to plant as many alarm-panels around the place which panicked people are unlikely to use on their way out anyway.
- petsfed 3y ago
  I dunno how much time you've spent around fire alarms, but they're required to be painfully loud. Not "permanent damage" loud, but loud enough to trigger e.g. migraines in people who suffer from them. This door had a fire alarm on it. The university needed to control access to the facility through one secure checkpoint (that I had worked at in the past, but at this time no longer did so). They didn't want (for instance) random townies to be able to come and go via the side doors without filling out the relevant liability waivers, because it turns out screwing around in a weight room carries some risk. To say nothing of the consequences of some rando wandering in off the street and posting up in the locker room. I was answering phone calls, helping people rent outdoor equipment. My job was not at all watching the door. But I had to deal with 19 year olds who (and I did watch this a couple times) would look directly at the sign, pause to read it, push the door open, then have an utterly shocked expression that the PAINFULLY LOUD alarm was going off. And I'd have to drop whatever I was doing, go turn off the alarm, then recompose and return to the customer that I was helping. Please explain to me what is so objectionable about a school controlling access to its facilities.
Terr_ 3y ago
> "Fire door, alarm will sound". IMO those doors shouldn't just have a sign-sticker slapped on them, there ought to be something visually (and tactilely) different about the push-bar itself. P S.: For example, a wavy bar, or a bunch of distinctly raised bumps on the surface in strong contrasting color like high-vis yellow with reflectivity. Since this is for an indoor surface nobody should be touching, that means durability isn't a big issue: Just stick some adhesive blister-chunks onto whichever push-bar happens to need the warning, and then scrape them off if the situation changes.
- petsfed 3y ago
  The whole reason that I had keys to enable/disable the alarm was specifically because the Outdoor Program that I worked at needed to load in/out large equipment (think canoes, bikes, sleds, etc) that was ungainly to move through the locker room. This was also the primary avenue for moving e.g. weight room equipment in and out of the facility. So while it didn't get used a lot for non-emergency use, it got used often enough that non-durable controls would degrade much too quickly.
- codazoda 3y ago
  Many of these, however, should just be doors. For many of them the alarming of them seems unnecessary.
- avidiax 3y ago
  Just coat the bar in anti-climb paint. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-climb_paint https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-climb_paint
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    But what if an actual emergency occurs? People still need to be able to reliably grip and manipulate the door bar/plates/handles, you can't just make them super slippery all the time.
    - avidiax 3y ago
permo-w 3y ago
>I eventually dropped all pretense of understanding that they were on autopilot, and began commenting as I deactivated and reactivated the alarm AGAIN "I thought universities required students be able to read". this is an odd sentiment. so what, you were originally pretending to give them the benefit of the doubt, but then you just gave up? so your original thought was that they were doing it on purpose for some reason? why on earth would they do that?
- petsfed 3y ago
  I started out giving people (the perps were uniformly male) the benefit of the doubt, but my patience wore thin with how frequently it happened, and finally I started explicitly calling people out. I suppose, I should've phrased it as "I eventually dropped even the pretense of understanding..." >why on earth would they do that? Why on earth would a 19 year old male, who has never been away from home before, has likely never seen any real consequences for their behavior before, read a sign that warns them of said consequences, and still decide that those consequences are less bad than walking an extra 100 feet through a locker room? I assume the same reason that similarly aged college males removed all of the fluorescent light tubes from the hallways of their own dorm. Or the same reason at least one of the shower drains in the dorm's men's communal bathroom was plugged with paper towels every month.
  - maxcoder4 3y ago
    They were obviously on autopilot. People are sometimes tired, may be going through a lot, think about something else at the moment, and just don't read every sign on every doors they find. You sound a bit bitter here. I know I am friendly distracted and made many similar mistakes in my life - but never intentionally.
    - petsfed 3y ago
      Autopilot makes sense when that door is usually open, usually available, but today for some reason its closed, and that's unusual. This door was closed and alarmed year-round, for decades, until the building was renovated and that particular exit was removed entirely. If its a new student, I get it, and I was rarely salty about people making that mistake early in a semester (It happened so frequently in September that my boss would occasionally leave the alarm off until the end of his workday for the whole month). If this was still happening in April (and it did), when that student has realistically been going past that door and through the locker room since at least January, and more likely since August, its not "autopilot".
nkrisc 3y ago
If it looks like a regular door, people will open it. If it is not a regular door, it should not look like one.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Or it should require an unusual and awkward action to open, like having to reach up and break something: https://cdn-01.media-brady.com/store/stuk/media/catalog/product/d/m/dmeu_fre400_1_std.lang.all.jpg https://cdn-01.media-brady.com/store/stuk/media/catalog/prod...
  - nkrisc 3y ago
    Never seen that before but that would certainly do it.
  - eru 3y ago
    Well, if it's an emergency door, you want people to be able to use the mechanism when out of their mind with fear and a stampede behind them.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> Fire door, alarm will sound Honestly it's a little ambiguous and confusing. When will the alarm sound? "When there's a fire" is the immediate answer that comes to my mind. Doors don't generally trip loud alarms when you open them. Not once in my life have I ever come across such a door. The idea is pretty foreign to me. Wouldn't be surprised if others were equally confused. You were familiar with that particular door and its alarm-tripping nature, others probably weren't. "Alarm will sound if opened" might have reduced such incidents.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
  That's an interesting reading of it. Why would it be printed specifically on the door if it didn't have something to do with the door?
interestica 3y ago
> "I thought universities required students be able to read" Clearly there was a UX/Design issue with the door. A person approaching a door is already thinking about what's on the other side. Maybe the warning needs to be before the door. Or maybe there needs to be a different design to the door. I'd guess that the door looks like every other door they encounter on campus.
- scotty79 3y ago
  Something like those "wet floor" signs on the floor in front of the door. Easy to remove intentionally. Hard to get around accidentally.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  If only we could get people to agree on standards, it'd be easy to believe (for large facilities at least) one might have something like: unpainted - (or beige, etc.) this is a normal door red - don't use this door blue - use *this* door

QuantumYeti 3y ago

Sounds like you were upset that you had a job looking at a door, and took it out on people.

ethanbond 3y ago
It’s totally reasonable to scold people for using emergency exits (especially alarmed ones) without an emergency need. It also doesn’t make you a bad person or stupid to subconsciously miss signage. But you should be okay with a bit of scolding in that case.
- QuantumYeti 3y ago
  It's not reasonable to scold strangers, especially if you're just some random employee.
  - vermilingua 3y ago
    Yes, it absolutely is reasonable to scold strangers for things like this, especially if you’re an employee who sees it happening regularly.
    - permo-w 3y ago
      scolding is broadly something you do to someone you see as beneath you. if you feel the need to scold strangers, you've probably got other issues
      - kelnos 3y ago
        I think you have a definition for "scolding" outside the mainstream. You scold someone who has done something wrong and should know better. There need not be any judgment about the person's worth attached.
        permo-w 3y ago
        the definition of scolding is "angrily rebuking or reprimanding someone". in my understanding of human psychology, that is something people do not do to people they see as equals. more specifically it's a behaviour a person is extremely unlikely to participate in if they feel the other person has enough social, physical or economic capital to punish them for it.
        matheusmoreira 3y ago
        I see your point and you're definitely right about that. If you're going to publicly scold someone in front of their peers, you better be ready because it's going to personally insult them in very deep ways, to say nothing of their social standing. If you're scolding someone you should probably be a badass drill sergeant, literally made of muscle, many times their superior in rank and with enough balls and testosterone to unblinkingly look them in the eye while heaping abuse right at their faces without one shred of hesitation, so that the sheer audacity of it all shocks and intimidates them into total submission. And you would also do well to remember that at least one movie depicts exactly one such drill sergeant getting shot in the chest when a certain scoldee went postal over it.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Is there even a reason for an emergency exit to not be treated as a regular, auxiliary exit? I.e. not labeled as regular, but also not an issue if people use it.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    The reason is often the opposite: you don't want people coming in that door (maybe it's a limited-access building and you don't want to staff security/ID checker at more locations). Sure, you can lock it from the outside, but if people are regularly leaving from that door, randos outside are going to sneak in before the door shuts.
  - petsfed 3y ago
    If the facility has any need to control access, they need to be more aggressive than just one way doors, since fire-code compliant one-way doors are trivially defeated with a doorstop.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    > Is there even a reason for an emergency exit to not be treated as a regular, auxiliary exit? Absolutely, ex: 1. When that exit may be used as an entrance to a prohibited or fee-only area. Someone inside opens the latch for people waiting outside, either intentionally or accidentally, allowing them to enter without being noticed. 2. To supplement other things which may trigger an alarm, or for situations that can't be detected in a simple standard automated way. (E.g. violence, unusual chemical spill, wild animal.) It also means you don't need to plant as many alarm-panels around the place which panicked people are unlikely to use on their way out anyway.
petsfed 3y ago
I dunno how much time you've spent around fire alarms, but they're required to be painfully loud. Not "permanent damage" loud, but loud enough to trigger e.g. migraines in people who suffer from them. This door had a fire alarm on it. The university needed to control access to the facility through one secure checkpoint (that I had worked at in the past, but at this time no longer did so). They didn't want (for instance) random townies to be able to come and go via the side doors without filling out the relevant liability waivers, because it turns out screwing around in a weight room carries some risk. To say nothing of the consequences of some rando wandering in off the street and posting up in the locker room. I was answering phone calls, helping people rent outdoor equipment. My job was not at all watching the door. But I had to deal with 19 year olds who (and I did watch this a couple times) would look directly at the sign, pause to read it, push the door open, then have an utterly shocked expression that the PAINFULLY LOUD alarm was going off. And I'd have to drop whatever I was doing, go turn off the alarm, then recompose and return to the customer that I was helping. Please explain to me what is so objectionable about a school controlling access to its facilities.

Terr_ 3y ago

> "Fire door, alarm will sound". IMO those doors shouldn't just have a sign-sticker slapped on them, there ought to be something visually (and tactilely) different about the push-bar itself. P S.: For example, a wavy bar, or a bunch of distinctly raised bumps on the surface in strong contrasting color like high-vis yellow with reflectivity. Since this is for an indoor surface nobody should be touching, that means durability isn't a big issue: Just stick some adhesive blister-chunks onto whichever push-bar happens to need the warning, and then scrape them off if the situation changes.

petsfed 3y ago
The whole reason that I had keys to enable/disable the alarm was specifically because the Outdoor Program that I worked at needed to load in/out large equipment (think canoes, bikes, sleds, etc) that was ungainly to move through the locker room. This was also the primary avenue for moving e.g. weight room equipment in and out of the facility. So while it didn't get used a lot for non-emergency use, it got used often enough that non-durable controls would degrade much too quickly.
codazoda 3y ago
Many of these, however, should just be doors. For many of them the alarming of them seems unnecessary.
avidiax 3y ago
Just coat the bar in anti-climb paint. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-climb_paint https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-climb_paint
- Terr_ 3y ago
  But what if an actual emergency occurs? People still need to be able to reliably grip and manipulate the door bar/plates/handles, you can't just make them super slippery all the time.
  - avidiax 3y ago

permo-w 3y ago

>I eventually dropped all pretense of understanding that they were on autopilot, and began commenting as I deactivated and reactivated the alarm AGAIN "I thought universities required students be able to read". this is an odd sentiment. so what, you were originally pretending to give them the benefit of the doubt, but then you just gave up? so your original thought was that they were doing it on purpose for some reason? why on earth would they do that?

petsfed 3y ago
I started out giving people (the perps were uniformly male) the benefit of the doubt, but my patience wore thin with how frequently it happened, and finally I started explicitly calling people out. I suppose, I should've phrased it as "I eventually dropped even the pretense of understanding..." >why on earth would they do that? Why on earth would a 19 year old male, who has never been away from home before, has likely never seen any real consequences for their behavior before, read a sign that warns them of said consequences, and still decide that those consequences are less bad than walking an extra 100 feet through a locker room? I assume the same reason that similarly aged college males removed all of the fluorescent light tubes from the hallways of their own dorm. Or the same reason at least one of the shower drains in the dorm's men's communal bathroom was plugged with paper towels every month.
- maxcoder4 3y ago
  They were obviously on autopilot. People are sometimes tired, may be going through a lot, think about something else at the moment, and just don't read every sign on every doors they find. You sound a bit bitter here. I know I am friendly distracted and made many similar mistakes in my life - but never intentionally.
  - petsfed 3y ago
    Autopilot makes sense when that door is usually open, usually available, but today for some reason its closed, and that's unusual. This door was closed and alarmed year-round, for decades, until the building was renovated and that particular exit was removed entirely. If its a new student, I get it, and I was rarely salty about people making that mistake early in a semester (It happened so frequently in September that my boss would occasionally leave the alarm off until the end of his workday for the whole month). If this was still happening in April (and it did), when that student has realistically been going past that door and through the locker room since at least January, and more likely since August, its not "autopilot".

nkrisc 3y ago

If it looks like a regular door, people will open it. If it is not a regular door, it should not look like one.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Or it should require an unusual and awkward action to open, like having to reach up and break something: https://cdn-01.media-brady.com/store/stuk/media/catalog/product/d/m/dmeu_fre400_1_std.lang.all.jpg https://cdn-01.media-brady.com/store/stuk/media/catalog/prod...
- nkrisc 3y ago
  Never seen that before but that would certainly do it.
- eru 3y ago
  Well, if it's an emergency door, you want people to be able to use the mechanism when out of their mind with fear and a stampede behind them.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

> Fire door, alarm will sound Honestly it's a little ambiguous and confusing. When will the alarm sound? "When there's a fire" is the immediate answer that comes to my mind. Doors don't generally trip loud alarms when you open them. Not once in my life have I ever come across such a door. The idea is pretty foreign to me. Wouldn't be surprised if others were equally confused. You were familiar with that particular door and its alarm-tripping nature, others probably weren't. "Alarm will sound if opened" might have reduced such incidents.

8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
That's an interesting reading of it. Why would it be printed specifically on the door if it didn't have something to do with the door?

interestica 3y ago

> "I thought universities required students be able to read" Clearly there was a UX/Design issue with the door. A person approaching a door is already thinking about what's on the other side. Maybe the warning needs to be before the door. Or maybe there needs to be a different design to the door. I'd guess that the door looks like every other door they encounter on campus.

scotty79 3y ago
Something like those "wet floor" signs on the floor in front of the door. Easy to remove intentionally. Hard to get around accidentally.
082349872349872 3y ago
If only we could get people to agree on standards, it'd be easy to believe (for large facilities at least) one might have something like: unpainted - (or beige, etc.) this is a normal door red - don't use this door blue - use *this* door