Being an Engineer myself, I understand the complexities of a working system such as an office building. It's a living organism that incorporates the strength of structural design, the power of it's mechanical parts, the flow of the electrical circulatory, the hide-and-seek plumbing game, the wiring of computer-windows into the virtual world, and the chaos and unpredictability of all the people that bounce around inside it. It's a beautiful thing. I understand how any number of critical design components, derived from the brains of the highly intelligent, can lack precision. How a small slip up, years before the red-tap is cut, can cause disaster. How years of planning which leads to months of construction need nothing short of perfection. I understand that turning nothing into a giant staircase building is difficult. I can handle the idea that the miracle of engineering-perfection can be out of reach every now and then. But what makes this little flaw so fun is that it has nothing to do with years of preparation, with a dozen semesters of post secondary education, with big decisions, or wise innovations, in fact it has nothing to do with the actual engineering of the building at all. This flaw is the mangled icing on the top of a perfect cake.
Almost all the doors inside this building have been put on backwards.
This wouldn't seem like a big deal in the grand scheme of it all; it's not like they accidentally forgot the doors entirely and just built four-walled enclosures that they couldn't escape from, or replaced all the doors with gaping holes in the floor that turned the hallways into a parkour course. However, backwards doors do just enough damage to slowly chip away at the sanity of everyone walking through them.
For the most part doors don't get involved in our lives. They don't try to get too rambunctious or excited or difficult, and with the exception of the odd fashion statement, doors keep to themselves and play their role. But every now and then you get some door that thinks it can be a Hero, some door that wants to be it's own beautiful and unique snowflake with it's own ideas of how to change the world. Idiot. These are the doors that are out to get us.
Here are a few rules of the Door World that apply to general door behaviour...
the following doors will open outward:
- Exterior-wall doors of Public buildings
- Public Room doors
- Storage Room doors
- Doors leading deeper into a building
the following doors will open inward:
- Exterior-wall doors of Residential buildings
- Private Room doors
This system is tried and true and not to be messed with, because the human brain can't handle it. The use of a door is one of many operations that the mind has created an autopilot function for. It's a simple task that we can handle executing from our subconscious, like walking, or spelling your name, or doing both while finessing out a left-cheek-sneak. It frees up space in our heads for the more complex and detailed things in life that require the serious brain power (such as investigating door dilemmas). The only problem with this approach is when change is introduced into our habit driven routines, and we are shocked out of our subconscious and forced to deal with relearning something that we had previously mastered. You don't know that you know it, but when you are walking towards a door, you know what the door knows, unless of course the door thinks it knows something new, then all you know is you're in trouble.
You might wonder why the misbehavior of a door should matter, or why we are generally accepting of the standard Door Playbook. It's because the Playbook isn't based on a whim. It's because these decisions are rooted in the primary functions of a door, and deep in our subconscious, where we store our autopilot functions, we already understand and respect this.
The top two Door priorities are 'access' and 'security', or 'versatility' and 'safety', or simply 'to open' and 'to close'.
Inward opening doors, such as the front door of a residential home, place their focus on security. The magic of the door's design is in its hinge, but this is also its devastating Achilles Heal when battling for security. Unless a costly, heavy-duty door is used with concealed or protected hinges, an outward opening door leaves it's precious hinges exposed to the outside world. Even with a couple heavy duty dead-bolts, access to a doors hinges, its jugular, makes for an easy answer to the Répondez-s'il-vous-plaît of the break-in invite. Therefore, in the case of private residential homes or smaller personal rooms where security is at a premium, an inward opening door is a more appropriate Door response.
Public buildings have the same security concerns, however they also have to consider the complexities of an emergency that is complete with a mass evacuation. When a hysteric brood of people need to exit a building quickly and easily during an emergency, it can be more than a little counterproductive to have a large mob piling up against a door that can't burst open. In fact, in many cases emergency exits will be equipped with Panic Bars instead of door knobs or handles in order to accommodate the idiocy that accompanies hysteria; don't worry about how to use the door, just run at it like a crazy person and the door will do the rest. Public buildings will take a hit and go with the more expensive option (giving the hinges their Tony Stark Iron Man suits) in order to balance security with safety.
This is where the giant Staircase drops the ball. Although the exterior-wall exits follow the rules like good little doors, the divided interior and corresponding hallways that flow towards the light of day are a complete guessing game. Each access way is equipped with it's own Rebel with a Cause attitude, wanting nothing more than to fool people as they try and push a Pull or stop and yank on a Push. Not only is this a fire hazard, and a massive safety oversight - I'm picturing hundreds of EngiNerds cutting the umbilical cord from their life giving computers for the first time in years only to push up against a backwards door, unable to Head-Smashed-in-Buffalo-Jump their way to safety - but it's a day-to-day irritation that is slowly contributing to a future massacre of Postal Worker proportions.
At first I thought I was losing it, I thought 'Door, it's not you, it's me', I thought I had reached a new level of uselessness where I couldn't figure out how to successfully walk through a door anymore. But then I noticed that it was only happening at work, and it was only happening once I was inside the giant Staircase's maze. In fact, eventually, I realized it was happening to people at work that weren't me. This was great. I was seeing people charging towards doors with that end-of-the-work-day kind of enthusiasm, only to awkwardly collide face-to-door and have to muscle passed the embarrassment of reenacting an America's Funniest Home Videos' classic. People were double pumping in frustration and resorting to two handed pulls as they tried to dig deeper into the building through Pushes disguising themselves as Pulls. They were quickly assuming 'access denied' instead of 'backwards door' in order to avoid getting caught failing to enter or exit in front of co-workers. They were being fooled by the Door day-in and day-out and they weren't terribly impressed.
And even after days or weeks of running head on into these doors with their radical ideas, people continue to struggle with navigating themselves through this mine field of embarrassment. All thanks to their clever autopilot programs. The same thing would happen if you got too creative with the height of a table or counter top, the placement of a sink's hot-cold faucets, the layout of a keyboard, or the arrangement of a number pad on a phone or calculator. There would be a nice sizable learning curve for any kind of Traffic Twist. Change the side of the road that people drive on; accident. And if you think there's safety in going by foot, even the pedestrians needing to look right-then-left not left-then-right when trying not to die as they cross the street-in-reverse. Switch the order of Gas and Break peddles, reverse the Lefty-Loosy-Righty-Tighty rule, put your watch on the other wrist, or toss the buttons over to the other side of the shirt, and you have to start re-programming yourself from scratch. It's tough to alter the autopilot, and tougher to admit that you are useless without it.
Now it's entirely possible that this backwards door routine isn't a mistake at all. In the fun and happy part of my mind I've wondered, maybe one day, after a pair of Glasses crashes into a Pull Door in a particularly loud and awkward fashion, if Ashton Kutcher might jump out from behind a decorative plant and announce the return of Punk'd for another season.
Why not assume Conspiracy? It might be the best way to explain the challenging Rise-Depth Ratio of the stairwells here, which is another complete disaster that plagues the giant Staircase with it's ironic danger - staircase up the sides of the building for show, check, staircase inside the Staircase for connecting floors, oops... I don't know if their was a horror film style death that occurred, or if a constant flow of falls has caused the concern, but the stairwells of the building look like the jacket of a Formula-1 Racer who's sponsored by Safety. Bright yellow grip tap mark up each step, large loud signs line the walls with 'Warning' and 'Danger' advertisements, caution tap covers the walls and railings like the entire collection of stairs is a crime scene, and notices against 'texting while walking', 'failing to use handrails', 'taking two steps at a time', 'following too close behind another person', and 'running, jogging, or jumping up or down stairs' are posted at each landing. If it wasn't for the fact that the company has a massive Civil-Structural department, I might offer up a knee slap or two, instead it's just ridiculous. Sad and just plain ridiculous.
If the doors and the stairwells weren't already enough, last week another leak sprung in this sinking ship of a building, and we had Al-Gore style, End-of-the-World kind of weather inside the Staircase. It was the opposite of Anthropogenic though and it didn't disappoint like Gore's Global Warming folk tales, this was nature laughing at our lack of control over our climate control, and it was delivering us a serious blow.
For the first part of the week, Calgary skipped over Spring and settled into Summer. A stale heat slow roasted the office until the only relief was the light breeze found during a brisk march in and around the cubicle farm (walk around with a piece of paper or a folder wearing a slight grimace or furled brow and you can get away with anything - people will just assume you're a working machine). Monday was bad, Tuesday was worse. After two days of working in the sweat box, I chose Wednesday's EngiNerd costume assuming my cubicle would once again become a sauna by 2pm; light pants, a short-sleeved shirt, a hydration pack... It was the only way to avoid heat stroke. It was nice.
By Thursday, Calgary's brief encounter with Summer had ended and it was back to Winter. This coincided with the introduction of the building's Central-Air. I don't know why it took three full days for the people making the big tough decisions to convince themselves that turning on the AC was a good idea, or why they left it on level 'Hurricane' for the rest of what became a miserably cold week, but they did, and we went very quickly from sauna to tundra. Maybe it's because I only have a month and a half of HVAC experience or because I'm two decades younger than everyone I work with that I just don't seem understand these complex issues yet.
It should be noted that HVAC stands for Heating, Ventilation, Air-Conditioning, and that our company has one of the biggest HVAC departments in the city. It should also be noted that just like the backwards doors and the death-trap stairwells, no one has apologized to me for the Day After Tomorrow style temperature swings. Maybe I'm sensitive like that, but I feel like some one needs to step up and get a good old fashion stare-down until they say sorry to me and I consider forgiveness. In fact, just yesterday I got the opposite of an apology - I walked by a plaque in the main lobby of the building that said the following:
"1988 Building of the Year Award - awarded by the Building Owners & Managers Association of Calgary".
I waited. I actually looked around and waited for Kutcher and his hidden camera team, because this was too much, it was just too much. The fix was in. I guarantee that in the spring of '89, during the heat of the exciting awards season, some amazing creation was cleaning up on the Building red-carpet circuit only to feel the cold slap of rejection by the BOMA selection committee when the Giant Staircase stepped in for the upset. Hell, that plaque is probably a fake. I bet if I tried, I could get you a Building of the Year Award plaque, no problem. If Walter can get the Dude a toe by 3 o'clock, than I can definitely get you a plaque, believe me...
One final thought: if it wasn't for my obsession with saving my work (you only have to watch a computer screen go blank and eat your unsaved efforts once before you change your life as a writer), this article would not exist, because the power in the entire south end of the building just went out for a solid half hour. We're just lucky we didn't have to evacuate, cause the only thing worse than being known as the building full of HVAC engineers that can't figure out the Heating and Ventilation, is to be known as the building full of HVAC engineers piled up at the bottom of the stairwells of doom, trapped behind doors that don't open...
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