Is it five? Or is it ten?
This really has nothing to do with anything, but as I was walking out of our building the other day I was about 20 feet from a door when a kind colleague (I didn’t know, by the way) waited for me and held the door. My hands weren’t full. I wasn’t limping. I was just leaving for the day and she waited an extraordinarily long time to keep the door open for me.
It got me to thinking — is there a universally accepted distance we all use when making that split-second decision to hold the door or not? Is it five feet? Ten feet? Or is it a universally-accepted time delay that our mind uses to decide to hold the door — five seconds, ten seconds?
Whatever — I suggest we all err on the side of more feet or more seconds. That woman who held the door made my evening and I learned a lesson from her: I’m never in such a hurry that I can’t invest a few seconds to be kind.
July 10th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
I’m a door holder. I can’t help it. I’m not sure if what the ideal distance is for the door hold, but I’ve held it so long a few times that it got awkward. Oh well…
July 22nd, 2009 at 1:42 pm
I agree — more minutes, more feet. Yet there’s a flipside: I’ve talked with coworkers who feel obligated to hurry in order to lessen the inconvenience on the door holder, so the courtesy of a long-distance door hold becomes more work than opening the door for themselves.
None the less, if I’m going to make an error, I prefer to err on the side of courtesy.
July 28th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Never hurts to be a little nice. Its sad to say that not all are kind. Time or feet does not matter. Only thing that really matters is treat others as you would want to be treated.