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Comment by petsfed | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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