An afterthought

[Mark Brader]

On 2008-06-20, when I used to read one of these newsgroups,
Dom Manno posted some remarks about a hospital he was familiar with.
In part, he wrote:

>>>> Apropos of nothing, I noticed something unusual today. The even-numbered
>>>> rooms have the door handle on the left hand side of the door, while the
>>>> odd-numbered rooms have it on the right. Wouldn't the hospital need to
>>>> have two sets of replacement doors, since you couldn't use a
>>>> right-handed door in an even-numbered room, and vice versa?

At the time I responded:

>>> I'm guessing that when you look down the corridor from the elevator,
>>> you'll find the even-numbered rooms on your left and the odd-numbered
>>> ones on your right. That way when they move beds around, interference
>>> from the door is minimized. Clever.

After Charles Bishop pointed out that the doors would open into the rooms,
I realized that I'd gotten it backward. This, I diagrammed, is what getting
a bed into or out of an even-numbered room would look like:

>> --------+ o----------
>>
>> +
>> from / \
>> ---> / \
>> elevator + \
>> \ \
>> --------o \ \ +----------
>> | \ \
>> | \ + <- bed would hit door here
>> | \ / if hinged the other way
>> | \ /
>> +
>> |
>> | into
>> v room
>>
>> I'm sure the bed doesn't look rectangular on your screen; it doesn't
>> on mine. But you get the idea.


As to the replacement doors, I wrote in the first message:

>>> Do doors get damaged so often in this hospital that they need to keep
>>> their own stock of replacements, then? And even if they do, they're
>>> probably symmetrical until the hinges and handles are put on.

But Charles responded:
>> Probably not. Doors nowadays come with the hinge mortises in, and
>> perhaps even the lockset holes pre-drilled. The jambs are going to
>> be steel, since it's a hospital... The hinge mortises make the
>> door either right or left handed.

At the time I said:

> They could, but they could also be made symmetrical for the hinge to
> be fitted in either way, couldn't they?

But on rereading this just now, I realized that there's another
possibility. If the door, including the hinge mortises and lockset
holes, is made *vertically* symmetrical, then it can be converted
from right- to left-handed by simply turning it the other way up.

NOW YOU KNOW.

Sorry, I didn't think of this before. It may have helped that in 2015
I actually had a door in my house converted in this manner to open the
other way. The doorframe needed to be changed, but not the door itself.

(Re-exits quietly.)
--
Mark Brader | The "I didn't think of that" type of failure occurs because
Toronto | I didn't think of that, and the reason I didn't think of it
m...@vex.net | is because it never occurred to me. If we'd been able to
| think of 'em, we would have. -- John W. Campbell

My text in this article is in the public domain.