Strange And Stupid Things People Do #1
In a long-running series of series that never get past the first installment, I would now like to introduce the first installment of a series called Strange and Stupid Things People Do. This series, which will soon be a reality show on Bravo hosted by Jane Kaczmarek, examines human behavior in the city of Washington and attempts to understand the miracle of how human beings have been able to cobble together something resembling peace and order in spite of our inclination to conformity, stupidity, cruelty and stubborn refusal to think anything out or even look eye-to-eye with simple logic.
Today we will be looking at what experts refer to as the "Second Door Phenomenon", a strange habit that you can observe in any building that has two doors side-by-side. Approximately 90% of all subjects (note: numbers not scientific or real in any way) will, instead of going through the door that is closest to them, is in their path or, say, doesn't already have another person going through it, will go through the door that is open. People are so conditioned (read: lazy) to just go through the door that's open that rather than using the door that they were heading for in the first place and using the tiny amount of strength that it takes to operate a door, that they'll shove in front of and around people coming the other way, go in through out doors (which is only charming and acceptable in Prince songs) and create no small amount of chaos and irritation.
Please: just go through the door that you were heading for. Just because a door is open doesn't mean you should go through it (which sounds like a nice life analogy that I'm sure is applicable to something somewhere).
3 comments:
You can't imagine how many times I have thought about this very issue in the past week or so. I think it's even been getting worse if that's possible.
I've realized though that I'm inadvertently contributing to the problem. While at lunch today, I was walking into a place just as a couple of old ladies were walking out. I opened the door on my side (my right, their left) but then stood back and held the door open for them. I guess I should have just gone through and made them go through the door on their own side, but they were old ladies and all. To make matters worse, instead of doing their best to hurry through while I held the door, they were so involved in their conversation that they took the longest I've ever seen anyone take to walk through an open doorway. (Note: this phenomenon must be related to the one you mentioned in an earlier post about stopping and waiting for someone to take a picture, only to have them take all day to do it while you're standing around waiting to get by.)
On my way out of the place though, someone did the same thing to me, and held open the door on their side. Instead of walking through it, I opened the door on my right instead, while they basically stood there holding an open door for no reason. I'm not sure if this was impolite on my part, but I'd had enough door congestion for one day.
-Scott
To be sure, people are lazy, but people are also lemmings. Going through an automatic door or taking the elevator one level is pure laziness (there's often a line of luggageless, physically fit people waiting for the escalator leading to the 7th Avenue exit of Penn Station while the adjacent stairs are deserted), but people altering their path and going through the one door that's open is something far more insidious: the inability of the general populace to think/act for themselves. Most people don't want to be the one person doing something different, no matter how small that thing is. It's almost as if they actually LIKE riding in overcrowded train cars. I've found that in crowded public situations, I am usually able to get places a lot faster than most people by simply looking for and taking alternate paths, and because it's usually easier and less time-consuming to do so, I can't believe it's laziness that keeps most others from doing the same thing.
OK, so you go to take the subway and you have to pick one of two cars to get on (both equidistant from you). One car is crowded, the other is nearly empty. Which one do you choose? Why, the crowded one of course! There's obviously something better about that car, otherwise why would everybody else be choosing it over the empty car? Why should I waste my time thinking about it when the people before me have already done so and determined that the one car was the better choice?
(My analysis of the "lemming" train of thought)
-Scott
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