The pushing wear on the restroom doors at my local Chili’s

    by BlueChainsawMan

    20 Comments

    1. UsedToHaveThisName on

      Interesting. Are there a lot of male little people (sorry, I don’t know the proper term) compared to women? Or are men using their foot to kick the door open?

    2. Work harder, not smarter.

      Joke aside, i always push mid with my forearm/elbow because i dont want germs on my hands.

    3. It seems like women pushing above and to the inside of the push plate applies regardless of whether the door opens left or right: [https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/7bsqor/men_vs_women_bathroom_door_at_an_engineering/](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/7bsqor/men_vs_women_bathroom_door_at_an_engineering/)

      I wonder if people tend to avoid the push plate because they figure most other people use it and leave their germs there. If so, maybe the bottom of the push plate is the ideal spot to touch, assuming you don’t want to look like a weirdo pushing the top corner.

    4. On the men’s side, you can see there is actually a wear pattern similar to the women’s door at the same location. The other pattern is strange, I doubt that a lot of it is actually due to wear from opening the door. No one would be trying to open it from the far left side, yet the stain is failing there.

    5. Mooseandchicken on

      I guess most dudes do what I do: touch somewhere on the door that doesn’t look like someone else touched it recently (in case they *didn’t* wash their hands), and use something other than my damp hand to do it. Might be a knee, a hip, a foot, an elbow. In my brain the most likely place someone else who didn’t wash their hands will touch is the push-plate (or whatever that is called). But now that I see the wear pattern, I’m starting to rethink my entire strategy… lol

    6. My guess is that they’re facing each other and the entrance to the area between them is the the left of the men’s room. Men can shoulder their way in while the women have to do more of a turn turn and push.

    7. Custodian here, so you may not have heard of the term fomites. It’s an inanimate object that people touch that can carry and pass along diseases to others. They often teach custodians about fomites and how to wipe them down. Take for instance that metal piece on the door. A person that cleans would likely wipe that metal piece down really good because that is supposed to be where the majority of people touch. the rest of the door won’t get wiped down nearly as often as that metal piece.

      So when people touch the men’s sign or they push in the middle of the door, that part is not being cleaned as much as that metal part is. You would likely be better off just touching the metal part than some random part on the door.

      obviously, it would be better if you found a different way to open the door rather than your fingers/hand but I just wanted to throw out that bit of information.

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