Revolving Chamber of Death

This is a continuation of one of my previous posts, “WARNING: Penn State Campus Lies Ahead.”  This is a story about the time I got stuck in the revolving door at Pattee Library.

It was just like any ordinary fall day at Penn State, cool but sunny. I had decided to spend my break between classes in the library reading as I sometimes do, so I entered through the push/pull doors of the Paterno (northern) side of the library, headed to the third floor and proceeded to have a pleasant 2 hours of quiet reading time. My next class was in Willard, south of the library, so naturally I chose to leave out the other side.

Now, I actually had often avoided this entrance as much as possible because I’ve always had an apprehension about revolving doors. I’m extremely uncomfortable with the fact that the speed of the door can change and rely on the person that enters before or after you. You can be walking at a relaxing pace, thinking you are going to make it calmly into whatever building you are entering, and that can change in an instant if God forbid the guy behind you is late for a meeting. Suddenly not only he is running through the door, but you and everyone else in any of the quadrants have been taken to a sprint completely against their will. There’s just something not right about that.

Anyway, on this particular day, that apprehension turned into a distinct fear of these doors. As usual, I waited like a child boarding an escalator for the first time in order to gauge the speed of the door and a space that I could dive into the door. When people began to line up behind me I figured it was my time to go for it whether I could find the perfect break or not, so I walked toward the door and hopped in the first open space.

I will never know what happened in the next 3 seconds that shrunk that door space from the normal 4 foot space to approximately one foot, but whatever occurred had me trapped in a space in which I could not move my feet one in front of the other. I’ll also add now that in addition to revolving doors I have a slight fear of small spaces, otherwise known as claustrophobia. In this very instant, two of my fears were slapping me in the face in the form of a glass door. I continued to push, fall really, into the door pane in front of me and as it moved my feet shuffled below me. I could see through the glass that the line of students flowing through the library doors had come to a halt and most of them were looking to see what the hold up was. That would be me. My body, still stuck in the right side of this revolving door at Pattee.

I’m not quite sure how long I was actually stuck in the door, but in my mind it felt like 5 minutes. As more and more people gathered outside of the door, I started to wonder if they were now lining up to get into the library or to simply watch me struggle. Somehow I had finally shuffled far enough to see daylight and I burst through the opening like I had never experienced a breath of oxygen.

Now I had to decide what to do with myself to minimize the humiliation I felt as everyone watched in shock, probably never having witnessed a human having such a struggle with a manmade object. I decided to do what any self-respecting person might do after they fall face-first on the ground. Get back up and act like nothing happened. So, I stood up straight and continued walking at a normal pace, took out my cell phone, and began texting every single person I knew about what had just happened.