something scary at the bottom of the stairs...

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At the fairly well-known educational institute I'm currently attending, the above is what greets you when you try to walk out from the main floor in Stairwell 1.

The doors on every floor toggle (arbitrarily?) between a Keep Closed warning and an Alarm Will Sound warning. While I'm about 60% sure that even the Alarm Will Sound ones won't actually sound an alarm when you open it, I'm not about to test this theory out and risk an inadvertant school bell fiasco in the middle of downtown Vancouver. This one looks like it's going to ring about 5 alarms, doesn't it?! Then again, maybe I'm just too easily scared.

Showing this as photo evidence of something that could be made much easier, to encourage the healthiness of walking instead of using the elevator. For me, it was a two-day affair figuring out how to walk the stairs to my regular classroom, and even then I have to change stairwells part way.

I'm almost annoyed enough to send it to Seth Godin's ThisIsBroken.com but the site's pretty old and this doesn't seem quite broken enough. Partly posting her because my mini-experiment kind of works: if you toggle between pictures 1 and 2, you get some approximation of the flashing light scenario down there.