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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

I feel like a similar thing happens in "real life" sometimes, not just on websites. Back in high school, I used to volunteer at an animal shelter, and we had an area out back where we'd walk the dogs or let them run around in one of a few fenced in areas throughout the day so they could go to the bathroom and get some exercise. The door leading out here was located in one of the rooms with dog kennels, so people coming to potentially adopt a dog would walk through this room a lot, and often they'd try to walk out back and watch or participate with the volunteers and staff taking some of the dogs out. We'd ask them politely to go back inside because they aren't allowed out there and point out the very large sign in large font on the door saying this, and every time they'd always act very surprised because they claimed not to have seen it. I'm sure some people were just feigning ignorance because it seemed easier, but the sheer number of people claiming it makes it believable that at least _some_ of them genuinely didn't notice; they saw a door, they wanted to go through, and they opened it without processing the words right in front of their face.

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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 "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.

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

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.

It's not reasonable to scold strangers, especially if you're just some random employee.

Yes, it absolutely is reasonable to scold strangers for things like this, especially if you’re an employee who sees it happening regularly.

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

So if one of your peers pulls a fire alarm or blasts an air horn in your work place, while you're on a call or engaged in some other highly focused task, the appropriate response is to just shrug and think "I need to be such a highly emotionally controlled person that I can only passively deactivate the alarm, contact an authority who won't even be here before the culprit leaves and just move on with my day"?

Fine, I didn't "scold" this person, I called out a peer for their shitty, antisocial behavior. Or is holding someone accountable even in words for the painful consequences of their decisions unacceptable too?

>So if one of your peers pulls a fire alarm or blasts an air horn in your work place, while you're on a call or engaged in some other highly focused task, the appropriate response is to just shrug and think "I need to be such a highly emotionally controlled person that I can only passively deactivate the alarm, contact an authority who won't even be here before the culprit leaves and just move on with my day"?

why are the two options angrily telling someone off or silently and submissively accepting the situation?

the way mature adults react to interpersonal trouble is by quelling instinctive emotions and calmly communicating

I didn't light into him like a drill sergeant. And I didn't go off on every person who walked through that door. I just turned off my customer-service obsequiousness for once and directly stated (without yelling) what I thought: that his only mitigation, that it was an innocent mistake, reveals that he has absolutely no business attending a university.

But apparently, my comment (just checked, I never even used the word "scold") suggests to you that I must have been shouting him down, calling him a lazy, stupid asshole, for not walking the extra 100 feet through the correct exit, like everyone else had been doing, for months. Lord knows a part of me wanted to, but I am not the unhinged psychopath you clearly think I am.

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.

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.

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.

    it's going to personally insult them in very deep ways,

That's exactly the point of scolding. To help people calibrate social behavior outside of the judicial system. We do 10,000 things per day that are now necessarily laws but are carefully tuned social behaviors.

I didn't really understand this until I had a 2 yr old and had to explain all of them.

Sure, there are more tactful ways to scold but sometimes when people are too far gone you just have to publicly shame. They've already missed a few dozen subtle cues before making it to this point

If you're an employee, and a member of the public is in your workplace, then you have a reasonable expectation that they will behave according to the rules of that workplace. Often these rules are for safety, and for sure it is absolutely reasonable to scold strangers if they have zero situational awareness.

I work in a medical practice. We have an expectation that people will obey rules for their and our protection. For example: we had a sign that, at our reception desk, that people should stay behind a line and not approach too close.

There was a thick, clearly visible tape line on the floor.

There was a two large signs on reception desk asking patients to stay behind the line.

This is during the heightened awareness of the pandemic. People were asked to change their behavior in many ways.

Patients would just come up to the reception desk and lean over the desk.

Damn right I "scolded" them for it. I mean, I didn't roast them, but I used a tone of voice, and asked them to step away from the desk, and pointed out the signs. Some of them were cranky about doing so ... when SARS was rampant!

“Just some random employee” as in… the person tasked with maintaining security and safety of the facility?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> "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.

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.

Many of these, however, should just be doors. For many of them the alarming of them seems unnecessary.

Just coat the bar in anti-climb paint.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-climb_paint

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.

The ones in the US are simply a crash bar. I suppose you could argue that someone might choose to burn instead of getting grease on their hands, but that sounds unlikely.

TIL. Wanted to get some for my 2 yr old but it sounds slightly toxic.

Another option in use around here require the user to break glass before being able to use the door; as with fire alarms, having to break something has been proven extremely effective in deterring misuse, accidental or unintentional use of things like fire exits.

Often emergency doors need to open in situations like dim lighting and a crush/stampede of people behind you, which makes it hard to create a safe implementation for whoever happens to be at the front.

In the safest implementations, the person doesn't even need to know they are about to break something by pushing the bar... But puts us back at square one except with more maintenance headaches.

Red scotch tape over door handle is much easier to apply or replace.

Break glass works if sign discovery was the only issue.

Many times (especially students), they simply don’t care. Replace the glass and the next day it’s broken anyway. The only solution I’ve seen that works against that is covering the door handle in super sticky ball bearing grease.

>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?

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.

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.

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".

> 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.

A door in a position that invites to be opened, that makes it convenient for egress, is a door that almost always can be used for that purpose. That it's closed is irrelevant - almost all doors are almost always closed all the time; it's very unusual these days to spot doors that are even ajar, much less fully opened.

This is the default mode; for doors that beg to be used for exit to be unusuable for it, armed with alarm and/or annoyed staff member, that is unusual.

sounds like theres a healthy dose of sexism at play here.

No, there are very real differences between genders. You can pretend there isn't for Internet Points, but you're just wrong.

there's a gulf between "there are no differences between genders" and mass generalisation based on emotional reaction, and for me this flies a lot closer to the second one

So you haven't been in a college dorm then.

I'm not gonna speculate about whether its biological or something to do with how 19 year old men ca 2006 had been socialized up to that point. All I'm saying is that it happened dozens of times, and it was never a woman who pushed that door open.

You already gave an explanation before that had nothing to do with any difference in gendered behavior (it was next to the men's locker room), which makes it even more baffling that you're now suggesting that no, it really was because men were less capable of not opening the door.

It does look like that, and certainly, that may have been an additional factor, but the main issue is that this exit was the one closest to student housing (dorms and fraternity/sororities) and also to the men's locker room. It was very rare that folks would go out the fire door by the women's locker room, but it wasn't really adjacent to where the newest students would be.

To be clear, I identify as male, and have done so my whole life. So this wasn't like "young college male sees a woman to antagonize" or "college female sees sexism everywhere", so much as "young college male somehow believes that 'alarm will sound' is just a bluff".

Whether or not that's biological in nature, or just the way 19 year old men circa 2006 were socialized, I won't speculate. But I never saw a woman open that door.

You seem all twisted in knots.

Are you kidding me? 18 and 19 year old males are like the highest risk taking, complete fuckery, "hold my beer bro", push the limits demographic by a long shit.

true, but that doesn't mean that's what was happening. did you read the article?

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

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/prod...

Never seen that before but that would certainly do it.

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.

> 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.

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?

> "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.

Something like those "wet floor" signs on the floor in front of the door. Easy to remove intentionally. Hard to get around accidentally.

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

All of us act, much of the time, on varying degrees of autopilot. It's unlikely that the automatic parts of the brain can read, although presumably they are quite capable of pattern-recognizing and processing learned symbolic language like traffic signs (and even that's by no means guaranteed – so many humans merrily ignore or miss changes in signage in traffic, having traveled the same route a thousand times before).

The strength and type of stimulus required to "wake us up" – for the brain to realize there's something novel or unexpected that requires the activation of higher-level, analytic parts of the brain – probably varies a lot from person to person, but just a bunch of text is not always enough to do that unless accompanied by familiar semiotic language, which is of course the reason we use symbols and colors to make important messages more likely to be perceived and understood. The best wake-up signals are, of course, those that physically prevent you from doing something you intended to do – a locked door, for example.

Unfortunately with up to a few dozen dogs needing to go outside multiple times a day and a half dozen volunteers that are only on shifts for a few hours at a time, there were just too many different people needing to go through that door too often for it to be worth locking it and distributing keys to everyone. Maybe having the door locked and the key hanging right next to it would be enough for people to disengage autopilot, but I'm not convinced that non-volunteers wouldn't just grab the key and open the door sometimes as well. Plus, some of the dogs could be quite strong, and the volunteers ranged from teenagers to retirees, so having both hands on the leash and being able to just push the door open was preferable in a lot of circumstances.

There are so many signs that everyone encounters everyday that are of no consequence. Everyone develops the habit of not reading them.

Adblock for the brain.

This is the problem with advertisements. The vie so hard for your attention they really are hard to ignore. But after they catch your attention you've realized that your attention has just been wasted. Soon you catch yourself just filtering out anything that could potentially be an ad.

I once visited a sword shop, and only noticed the signs tiled every metre horizontally and vertically across the walls saying "do not touch" when the person I was with told me about them as my fingers hovered mere centimetres from one of the wall-mounted blades.

I also didn't notice the moonwalking gorilla in the famous video clip despite being aware in advance that there would be one.

Definitely a thing. Just yesterday I was annoyed by my auto mechanic's credit card fee, and said they should've told me up front.

She pointed out it was on a sign on the counter that I was looking at that moment, and had also been there when I dropped the car off the day before.

In the early days of the pandemic, the retail chain I worked for had a curbside delivery only policy. No customers in the store period, you had to call us and we'd bring your whatever out to you.

No amount of signage on the door would stop people walking in. I stacked a bunch of boxes physically blocking the door and people still forced their way in.

The only thing that worked was putting a strip of blue painter's tape across the doorway directly at eye level.

I have long since stopped trying to make sense of other people's behavior.

A bunch of stacked boxes are really ambiguous. Did someone stack them there on accident, or as a prank?

No, that's not it at all. This was after multiple conversations with the same person explaining the situation. There was signs on the door, on the boxes, with giant type, highlighters, bright colors, the works.

This was people explicitly ignoring any and all signals contrary to their desires.

The confusing bit is that a strip of tape with no other context is what stopped them. Probably just that it was something so outside of the ordinary experience that it forced them to actually engage their brain for a moment.

I've spent a couple of years working in customer service. I was continually mystified by people's behavior. I would spend a large amount of time trying to comprehend why they did something and couldn't gain any purchase on a possible answer. Some people's behavior had an element of randomness in the sense of not adhering to a pattern.

> feigning ignorance

We have our hourly rate printed on a sign in our conference room. The walls are very clean, with almost no other signage. Despite communicating my rate to a client (via email) and having two meetings in this room, this particular client was shocked when they received my final bill which (again) stated our rate. I believe in this case they were just unhappy and looking for an "emotional plea" way out of payment.

Sounds like a UIUX problem. Sign makers get about half a second to convince a rushed person to pause, between the moment the sign enters their field of view and the moment they're already through the door. If the sign is anything more than a large red STOP symbol and anything more than the words NOT AN EXIT and/or AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, then I bet most people don't read it. I probably wouldn't, unless I was incredibly bored. Most signs are irrelevant to most readers and we are constantly inundated with them on every door and every hallway wall we walk down. If it was important it would follow internally recognized danger signage UIUX standards. Which usually just means a big symbol. Everything else is just another blurry bakesale announcement that flashed past our face.

As an aside, I was intrigued by your use of quotes around "real life". I think we've collectively gone so far down the internet rabbit hole that real life, ie. not on the internet, is seen as the anomaly or unreal. Not the other way around.

I have terrible trouble with signs when I’m walking. Unless they’re directly in my way I mostly ignore them.

On the other hand if I’m sitting around, like at an airport I read all the signs no matter how irrelevant.

NotAlwaysRight.com has tons of stories about people who ignored signs, closed doors, locked doors etc.

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