Somewhere in MY lifetime I learned the helpful advice “Don’t push or grab glass building materials anywhere but the handle” and “Push an elevator button to open the doors”. Sometimes you get reminders of these lessons and their importance.
The school’s boy’s bathroom had a glass door that swings a little to wide into the hallway. If you are a small person you can push the door from the inside of the bathroom out into the hallway and slip through the opening created by this flaw. No one designs a door to a bathroom to open into a hallway of a school because if someone was running down the hallway they’d run face first into a plate glass door. That’d be seriously dangerous. As badly designed and unsafe as the work environments can be, that’s too much even for Korea.
The door, and the bathroom, were designed the have the rubber seal on the bottom of the door set up to prevent the door from opening the wrong way, but over time, hundreds of tiny hands pushing the door out into the hall instead of in towards the bathroom interior has worn down the rubber seal and compounded the problem. The door only stops in the hallway when the rubber seal catches on part of the floor.There is no permanent jam on the door to stop it.
The problem is that the door’s handles are easier for taller people to use, so the children push directly on the glass instead of pulling the door towards themselves. There is a frosting on the bottom of the glass to prevent anyone spying on you while you use the facilities, and a big sign that says “PUSH” from the hallway, and “PULL” on the inside of the door written in Korean. Despite these signs, half the time the door is swung into the hallway and I have to properly shut the door when I use the urinal.
I was trying to leave the bathroom to enter the hallway. There were two boys outside the bathroom trying to get in. They couldn’t see me because of the frosted glass, but knew some shape was behind the door at least. The door had swung five centimeters or so into the hallway before it had caught and stopped moving. Rather than force the door open the incorrect way, I grabbed the handle to close the door, then open it into the bathroom the proper way so I could exit. I was using the door as it was designed. Children being impulsive like they are, and Korean children never expecting to need to wait for anything, ever, did exactly what any person with a bit of common sense wouldn’t. The boy jammed his fingers between the closing door and the frame. I shut the door right on his fingers by accident.
I saw what happened in slow motion. The door sort of bounced off them for a second, I let go, and he ripped them out and shoved them directly into his mouth. Luckily they were all still there. He gave me a look of shock, and I gave him a look of, “What the hell did you expect to happen?” A secretary took him downstairs to calm him down. He didn’t bleed, or break anything, but he was lucky the door was only open a little. Had I had any momentum as I opened the door it’s likely his fingers would have been on the floor.
The other time this comes up at school is when students try to open low windows in the classroom. The windows swing out of the classroom and are at an odd angle. Students will push directly on the glass, or stand up, turn around, and push the window out with their heel. I can just imagine the first student putting his heel through the glass window, slicing up his leg, and blaming me for telling him to open up the window. I keep telling students to never open things made of glass without using the handles, but they just don’t listen.
Occasionally I’m guilty of this sort of stupidity too. My wife’s maternity hospital had elevators. These elevators have ridiculously short entrance and door closing times. By the time the elevator empties of people, the doors are shutting on the people waiting to get inside. You must physically hold the button to keep the door from shutting. There is no “door safety catch” that you can slap with your hand to make the doors open again as you get in at the last second.
Once I was late to one of her appointments. We had traveled on separate subway trains and I was trying to catch up before her sonogram was scheduled. I ran to catch a departing elevator and almost got stopped by a closing door. The thing nearly knocked me over as I squeezed inside. I didn’t trigger the safety opening mechanism by hitting the button, so I almost had a bite taken out of me.
Worse, however, was when the same thing happened to my wife. I told her she had to watch those elevators because they close fast and don’t open again when they hit something in their way. She was getting onto the elevator with her very pregnant stomach preceding her. The last person was barely off the elevator when she got an closing door to the belly. I got the doors back open by hitting the button, but she was shocked. “Why would the doors DO that?” she said as she rubbed her elbow and arm, which took the brunt of the attack. “I mean, it’s a maternity hospital. We can’t move that fast!” She was fine, but still, why design an elevator specifically to be cruel to the people that need to use it most?
