Those are the actions of someone who has dealt with The Public
Literally had to put a sign on my door saying to use the god damn doorbell with an arrow pointing directly at it. The pizza guy would then call me, asking why I didn’t open when he knocked. Maybe because I can’t hear your fucking knock, which is why I bought a god damn doorbell! Fuck the public.
As a psych nurse who’s worked a unit with door alarms, somebody is going to have an aneurysm if they have to reset that alarm one. more. GOTDAMN MOTHER-FUCKING TIME.
Ours were specifically between the top of the door and the frame to keep people from anchoring a noose there. But that also meant they went off any time somebody finished toweling off out of the shower and threw the towel over, every time somebody grabbed the top of the door frame to stretch, and every time somebody was just mad about something at 2am and wanted all the other patients to suffer too. And you had to walk down to the relevant room and use your key in the little panel next to the door. Every. Single. Time.
So fun fact, there’s actually a academically researched phenomenon called “clinical alarm fatigue” where people get so used to turning alarms off that they stop checking before dismissing them. It’s like when you play a heavily modded game (mine was morrowind) and keep skipping through bogus warnings about missing textures and whatever but while you’re spamming the enter key a real one pops up and the whole thing crashes. It’s part of how radonda vaught killed that lady. Many of the alarms she overrode that day were warnings the nurses routinely had to override to complete daily tasks.
Anyway that’s the story of how the one time somebody did actually try to hang themselves the staff members turned off the alarm, assured the patient it was a false one, and walked away.
spoiler
The reason I know this is because fortunately, instead of trying a different way, the patient eventually brought out the noose they had hastily jammed under the mattress and showed the day nurse, so I was able to be told this story in evening report instead of the health systems quarterly sentinel event PowerPoint. I have a Daisy from that patient for the talk we had that night actually, it’s one of two I’ve kept (there’s a lot that are just inappropriate in one way or another, although admin filters out the really bad ones). Kid wound up in the hospital because he got outed in fall semester and his family told him not to come come for Christmas. We typically had at least a few “homeless for the holidays” every year.
Nobody will ever understand alarm fatigue, or its close cousins. Not in history.
Happens in IT as well. If you choose to alert on all the things, you’re going to get burned at some point.
Sounds like when you start sleeping through your alarm clock, and the phone alarm, and the other other alarm clock.
What’s a daisy in this context?
It’s a nursing excellence award. Pretty prestigious. You can be nominated by a patient or an employee. They write down why they think you are deserving of one on a card and then a panel chooses who gets awarded. There’s even a runner-up kind of award if the nurse was in the final considerations but didn’t actually win.
oh yeah should have said it’s a nom not a full, one nurse at our hospital won one for changing the side a patient’s IV was on (in fairness that nurse is generally a sweetheart), but I’ve never seen a psych nurse actually win. Apparently at my last hospital the psych unit got the most actually but I think it was because people would hand them to the euphorically happy manics to keep them busy. I would usually hand them out to say a “special thank you” to their nurse because I figured on the off-chance they weren’t trying to slip the nurse their number or draw her a picture of their penis it would be nice. In retrospect maybe that’s why the committee ignored most of them though.
Maybe imprison fewer people against their will then
I mean I do think suicide should be legal but I also don’t think we should let people just do it without making them stop for a second and be evaluated to see if maybe there’s any better options for them that a mental illness might be preventing them from seeing.
signs are invisible to people. at my workplace we had to lock one of our double doors because of a maintenance issue and i put a sign saying “use other door” with a huge arrow pointing to the other door. the instant i walked away after attaching the sign directly on the door handle, someone tried the locked door. pushing the handle with the sign on it.
We have socially conditioned ourselves to ignore signage if we aren’t specifically looking for it. 99% of signage in today’s world is usually just an ad being shoved into your face trying to sell something. It is a bombardment of annoying and intrusive information to the point our minds have trained themselves to filter the visual noise out. It is literally too much for our mind to process, so most of it gets deleted from our consciousness in the same way the hole in your vision from your optical nerve is being hidden from your perception unless you specifically expose it.
This explains the ignorance of global warming perfectly.
Explains a lot of ignorance in general tbh
Now think about the people that need all that and how they treat road signage.
My brain tends to overlook the big BIG buttons. Like when I was on vacation last month and they had a different cashier system and I couldn’t find the “pay with credit card” button. I tried every other button on the screen, until I gave up and asked another person. They looked at me in absolute disbelief an touched the BIG button that took up about half of the screen. To me it just came into existence at this point of time, it just wasn’t there seconds before the other person touched it. I’m really careful about opening doors though, and I surely would have seen “emergency” written on the door.
Yeah, buttons should look like buttons. If it takes up half the screen a lot of people are going to miss it because they’re looking for something that looks like a button.
That’s bad UI, not you. Your brain was pattern matching for something that looked like a button, didn’t lock onto the non-button thing, because why would it?
Especially when almost any other time something takes up half a screen, it’s a goddamn ad.
“No, it opens both ways. I was here yesterday.”
slowly breaks the door open
I wonder how many times they had people trying to push the doors instead.
Had? I bet you they still have people pushing the doors all the time.
Maybe even more now because the button is perfectly camouflaged between all the useless signs.
I have no trouble understanding why this has to be this way.
Twice a year our facility has a staff day where we get hit up by aflac and find out how we are doing as a organization. We have huge placards we place in the walkways leading up to the doors. Our meeting room is right by those doors and inevitably we will have people who ignore all the signs saying closed walk to the doors and pull them several times before finally reading the sign that we also put on the door.
And sometimes you get so used to there being brightly colored ads,
corporate propagandamotivational messages and various warning signs everywhere, that you develop a blindness for everything too flashy and ignore it until you encounter a roadblock that doesn’t yield.This is true and not just about ads. It’s called ‘sign blindness’.
Having more signs can actually exacerbate the problem.
It’s not (always) about being dumb or careless, it’s our nature.You don’t normally have to step around a billboard.
Good thing they weren’t specifically talking about billboards and instead were speaking to the much broader spectrum of advertising strategies.
Good thing you aren’t them so its not up to you to say what they were talking about.
Truthfully it’s a design issue. If people keep coming up to a door and pulling on it, it’s because the design of the door is instructing them to do so. Design imparts information. A door in a home can have simple knobs - anyone living there can just learn which doors to push/pull. A door in a public space instead needs to be designed to tell people how to operate it, even without any labeling.
A door is a simple device. It shouldn’t require reading labels or a manual. It’s operation should be abundantly obvious. After all, even those who don’t speak the language or are illiterate need to be able to operate doors. A door that needs instructions is one that is poorly designed.
But what about the emergency described on the door? Does it also apply?
Yes, it’s probably referring to the climate crisis. I think it qualifies as a emergency allowing me to not use the button
Uhm, instructions unclear. Let me find something to break the glass.
The emergency: the button not working
Not even ironically. We have automatic sliding doors where I work, which are designed to open outward if pushed, to allow safe exit in a crowd stampede emergency.
Every so often somebody leans against it, bumps open the emergency mechanism, and trips the alarm. Which is pretty chill, but a staff member has to push it back into place before the door opens and closes automatically again.
Recently this happened, and instead of waiting 20 seconds for a staff to fix it, the customer pushed the doors the rest of the way out, because the door not opening automatically was “an emergency.”
So is there room to add “if button fails”?
Great, I think I got it, but just in case tell me the whole thing again I wasn’t listening.
this movie just randomly popped into my head last night when i was desperately trying to sleep and i couldn’t stop thinking about it. i blame you, for the record.
So just press the wall anywhere?
No, you’re supposed to rip the button out of the wall and push it towards the exit
Many years ago, before we automated our deployment, we got our devs to do it manually. The guy that wrote the instructions in bold red letters at the top, put something like “log in as X” and no one would follow. He asked me what to do, I said, “put it as step 1 instead of bold letters at the top”. Never had anyone mess up afterwards. Thank God we automated it though.
Our brains work in weird ways.
And people will STILL try to push the door, or wait for it to open.
Define “emergency”
The button not working
