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.

Those are the actions of someone who has dealt with The Public

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.

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.

I wonder how many times they had people trying to push the doors instead.

Now think about the people that need all that and how they treat road signage.

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.

"No, it opens both ways. I was here yesterday."

slowly breaks the door open

But what about the emergency described on the door? Does it also apply?

Great, I think I got it, but just in case tell me the whole thing again I wasn't listening.

So just press the wall anywhere?

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.

Oh hey, let me make a treasure map and put the treasure map into the treasure chest and bury it under ground.

Why can't people find my treasure? Are they fucking idiots or something?

I should probably put more maps in the chest.

Just like those ominous whispers when you look at the soft spot on a baby's head

To be honest, I sometimes miss these because I'm tall and they're so low, by the time I'm at the door, I don't see anything obvious. I have to bend my head down to notice there's writing on a button that otherwise looks like the top of a fob scanner or something.

Those big chunky buttons that push like emergency stop buttons but are green, they're helpful.

And people will STILL try to push the door, or wait for it to open.

Define "emergency"

Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department

I would just stand there looking lost just to see how many more signs could be put up.

Understood. Don't do anything apart from stop him entering the room.

This is like when there are way too many signs for the restroom at a restaurant - I like to imagine how each & everyone added has a little origin story to tell.

Receptionist: DID YOU NOT SEE THE SIGNS!?

Patient: bitch I'm blind.