Walking down hallways, thinking way too hard
Say you're walking down an ordinary office building type of hallway. Not a crowded hallway, not a particularly long hallway -- but not a really short one either. Let's say that there's just one other person walking in the same hallway. Doesn't matter whether they're walking in the same direction or you are walking towards each other. If you are both approaching a slightly narrower part of the hallway -- a fire doorway, for example, with both of the doors open unless there's a fire alarm. It does not matter how fast you are walking or how fast they are walking, or how far either of you is from the doorway, you will both reach it at precisely the same time. Every time. And one of you has to stand aside and let the other pass so as not to violate the personal-space-in-a-nearly-empty-hallway rules. It doesn't even seem to matter if one or both of you tried to slow down/speed up a bit in order to pass each other before or after the doorway.
Why? Am I the only one bothered by this? Does it happen to anyone else? Am I imagining it? Is there an equation or a formula somewhere that predicts or explains this phenomenon? Am I losing my mind?
2 comments:
oh, augh, HATE that. related to the "pedestrian chicken" phenomenon, wherein you catch the eye of someone walking toward you in the opposite direction and for several annoying seconds, no matter which either of you starts to head, the other one simultaneously moves in the exact same direction, so that instead of passing like the two goddam ships in the night you're supposed to be, you end up doing this little bob and weave. If you're really lucky, a logjam of other annoyed pedestrians starts to build up behind you. HATE.
There's an extremely narrow bridge here in Concord. It has signs that say "NARROW BRIDGE" and that warn vehicles over a specific size and weight not to attempt to cross it, and as you approach, you can see where the two-way lanes physically narrow to pass over it.
I used to travel this bridge eight times a week, for about six months, in late afternoon when the road was sprinkled with a moderate amount of after-school and leaving-work-early traffic, and again well after 9:00 at night when the road hosted almost no traffic at all except crickets, frogs, and the odd deer. I traveled in all kinds of weather -- heat, rain, snow, thick humidity, wind. In all that time, though, in all those different combinations, I crossed that bridge alone exactly three times, no more. I could always see the other car(s) coming, and the other car(s) could see me, but no matter how much slowing or speeding up each of us did, we always ended up squeezing by each other slowly and carefully on that blasted bridge.
I think there's a whole area of math devoted to figuring out why things like this happen.
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