If the door is broken, no harm - no foul. Thanks for telling me about it.
But if the door works perfectly well, why not use it? This building has multiple doors for a reason, doesn’t it?
It seems I’ve seen a rash of “Please Use Other Door” signs on completely new buildings. The doors are obviously not broken because the signs are permanent signs, not the makeshift ones you might make to warn somebody.
Why are we being forced into one door? What traffic flow engineering or security study thinks it would be better if we squish 10 people through one single door of a double door system?
And the people coming the opposite way through the door? Things get confusing if you’re in a high traffic area with a “Please Use Other Door” system. All etiquette and formalities break down badly when you have lines of people 10 deep on both sides of the door. Who’s first? Women, children, last-in-first-out? Chaos.
But if we could all get together and bust open that perfectly good, unused, lonely looking door…
Subscribe to cubicle
Hey great point! anybody out there who can give a good reason for this one?
Mark on August 30th, 2007 at 2:08 pm | Link
I am also annoyed by these signs, but I have an explanation:
Business owners and architects alike want certain traffic patterns, but local governments (usually at the city level) can dictate the placement of the business’s front door. The loophole is that you can have a secondary door which becomes your primary door with the addition of a “Please use other door” sign.
In my town businesses are required to have a door which faces the street, but for whatever reason there will be instances in which the business owner prefers customers to enter from the side — perhaps because it is more attractive or more products can be displayed there.
David Jones on September 11th, 2007 at 12:07 am | Link
Great complaint!
I work in an office that has one of those signs and the reason is that we took over two work spaces for rent and made it one office space. The door with the sign on it happens to go right into my personal office and I am not the receptionist, she is located at the other door. It frustrates me when people park in front of that other door and walk over to the door that leads into my personal office and try to get in. I am using that door as a window wall not a door. I am going to hang a blind on it with a bigger sign soon to hopefully make it look more like a wall than a door. I am sure that even new buildings were probably designed to have several entrances in case they were needed for multiple occupants, but like my business only have us as an occupant and also decided to block those doors off to the public. Maybe someone could come up with a way for the outside to not look like a door any more so people don’t get frustrated. Sorry to you people who have tried to enter my personal office space and was confronted with that pain in the butt sign.
Signed: PLEASE USE THE OTHER DOOR
Charyl on March 1st, 2008 at 11:08 am | Link
I am a General Contrctor and often an Astragal forces you to open one door before the other. The Astragal is an strip of metal that overlaps from one door onto the other. This helps prevent wind driven rain from entering the building. Often Double Doors are great for moving large items like furniture into and out of a building and also
have a nice scimetrical look. However opening both at the same time
leads to additional load on the HVAC system.
GC on April 21st, 2008 at 9:53 am | Link
What I am going to say may shock many of you. But (at least in Asia) the reason for this is due to various beliefs (including feng shui) sometime a door is deemed unfit for prosperity (good luck).
There is whole deal of ‘truth’ into door (window) placement and usage, and is practiced widely.
Priyanke de Silva on April 28th, 2008 at 10:41 pm | Link
Not all buildings design all of doorways in their building for customer use. Many businesses use these signs to direct customers away from entrances designed for employee or maintenance use only. This is so the customer does not walk through a door that could possibly lead to a maintenance area that is unsafe to the public or into deparmtnets with confidential and proprietary information.
Additionally, if customers wander into the wrong department or entrance, there may not be anyone at that entrance who is able to help them. It seems as though it would be more frustrating to wander around lost, looking for assistance, than to walk to the appropriate entrance where someone is waiting and ready to assist me.
Judy on June 18th, 2008 at 3:55 pm | Link
it’s a type of feng shui, which is good luck, where the people come in, the money doesn’t leave through the other door
Jia Wei on November 23rd, 2008 at 9:56 am | Link
As someone that used to sit in a lobby that is close to the doors, one reason why someone might suggest using another door is to keep the cold air out and the hot air in! When people hold the door open for the person down the street, two blocks away, the lobby gets cold quickly. The upper management in my building could care less about the comfort levels of the guards, or receptionists that manned the desk or the people that sat there in their absence.
Rickie on December 3rd, 2008 at 10:03 am | Link