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Handicap Doors
I’m finding myself harboring an ever-increasing ire against those who use those motorized push-button handicap doors. Not people with legitimate ails those doors were designed for, or even people who have a large load of stuff they’re trying to negotiate through the doorway with no free hands or a helpful stranger to spare. Note I’m tactfully vindicating myself because I use these doors to get TV carts through, thus preventing a wrestling match with the door and the door jam that would one day result in a twenty-seven inch falling on my head, rendering me handicap. Even children should be allowed to experiment with the mechanism to satisfy their curious minds, hopefully taking their fascination off of the gun daddy thinks he has hidden in the hall closet. No, I’m talking about the perfectly healthy adults who aren’t dragging along rickety carts loaded with fatal TVs, or anything more daunting than a half-filled drink cup. Mostly, they don’t have anything in their hands at all. I imagine they’re expending so much effort trying to come up with a justification for using the handicap button they exhaust all of their brain cells and just opt to push the pretty button. In summation, they’re idiots. I can only surmise these folks are lazy, but this still doesn’t make much sense. The amount of effort required to move most doors fitted with a mechanism around the school I work is negligible at best. My seven-pound yorkie-chi could probably force most of these open if he knew the benefits of it. When you use the handicap button, you have to come to a full stop, locate the button (which would be on the other side of the hallway or entryway), press it, and wait a few seconds for it to grind open enough so you can get your momentum up to go through it. The entire process is so inefficient compared to throwing the door open and striding on through. So why should I care? If any idiot wants to waste precious seconds of his life to have a lightweight door open for him, that’s his problem. Maybe in the time it takes for him to go through all of the doors he will in a typical day, he’ll miss the lottery numbers later that night and not become a millionaire, because if he did, he would probably buy a nuclear bomb just to cook his steaks faster and wipe out a county, or worse, finance a dozen additional Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer abominations. I should be rooting for the misuse of handicap doors, right? Unfortunately, these doors seem to be manufactured by the same folks that bring you those cheap Christmas tree lights developed with Chernobyl-quality safety standards. They seem to break down fairly easily, thus trapping a person who truly needs it, like a guy pushing a TV, on the wrong side of the door forever, or at least until he decides to risk death and hump the cart through. So cut it out. You look like a moron when you stroll briskly along, only to come to a dead stop to look at the door with a confused glare, then figure out how to press the button, after which you stare at the door dumbfounded until it opens up all the way and you get it in your head to get a move on. Hurry it up, because this TV isn’t going to deliver itself.
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