I should probably make another category for “confusion”. I’d say “stupidity”, but I think my reasoning wasn’t that terrible.
When I lived in Grad for a week before school started I was in a room that had a fire alarm thingy on it. When the door was locked, opening it would trigger the alarm, and closing it would (if I remember correctly) turn it back off. When the door was unlocked but closed, the only way to open it was to push the fire alarm bar, but the alarm wouldn’t go off since the door was unlocked. It is a very strange, stupid system, and every time I opened the door in Grad I braced myself for a loud alarm.
So when I went into the basement of Spingold to meet with my practicum coordinator-person, I assumed the same held true. I came at 1:05 for a 1:00 meeting, knocked on the door, waited a moment, and then…
Yeah.
Tried to open it.
Whoops.
Closing that kind of door does not silence the alarm. And the alarm is much, much loder then the ones in Grad, or at least it sure seemed that way in the narrow cement hallway. And the big guy who came to turn the thing off was just a bit angry with me, and thought I was somewhat out of my mind.
Yeah, anyway, the person I was supposed to meet with wasn’t there. 🙂
It’s more confusing than that, even…
I’ve lived in a couple different Grads (of the same type, even), and the ‘alarm’ doors work differently. In the one I was in last year, when I tried to lock it (without even touching the alarm bar) it wailed as soon as I had started turning the bolt. In the one I’m in now, the bolt doesn’t even respond to its knob-thingy. In neither one does the actual bar with the big red warning actually do anything but open the door.
It’s the Brandeis way – nothing works the same way as anything else, and half of everything doesn’t work at all.