A person stands in front of a door, entirely still. Just staring through the glass at the street outside refusing to believe.
Another jumps away from the door in shock, she rushes to a different type of door and pushes the handles hoping that no one saw.
Some just turn around, pretend they had never meant to go towards the door in the first place, it was just a misunderstanding you see?
All the automatic doors in the world have stopped working and no one wants to admit it. No one wants to think about what it means
This is a situation I have been dealing with all my life so I know how to react. They have never worked for me you see, I used to joke that it was because I had no soul. Like that episode of the Simpsons. The one where Bart sells his soul. And the door won’t open because he doesn’t have a soul. I joked that I also didn’t have a soul.
The thing I always found strange when I told that joke was that no one ever agreed. Some would laugh politely but none of them would ever admit that the doors wouldn’t open for them. I briefly wondered if it was a social faux pas, whether automatic doors were a far larger part of our culture than I realised. But soon it became apparent that there was just no shared experience for the joke to work, I was the only person who ever had to deal with automatic doors not opening.
At the time I viewed it as a burden, I used to have to wait till a normal person went in and dive through behind them, or traipse around and use the non-automatic doors. It was at worst a minor inconvenience I admit, but it still rankled. Now my suffering is suddenly a boon. I am the only person who isn’t panicking, who isn’t nervous, embarrassed. This has been my life for as long as I can remember and I am the only person on Earth who knows how to act, it’s liberating. It almost makes it all worth it.
I have not been blessed with any knowledge or insight as to why the doors have stopped working, a few see me as some sort of messianic figure who holds a special bond with them but this is clearly ridiculous. They are doors. I don’t know why they all stopped working at once, I guess they just realised they didn’t have to open any more. Why they gave me advance warning is a bigger mystery, I don’t think we will ever really know.
It’s not a major issue, all buildings must have non-mechanical doors for fire safety reasons.
