XPost: alt.fan.cecil-adams

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 msb@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.

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