Your hands are full and you're in a hurry. Approaching an automatic door, you lift your foot, take aim at the button and ...

        STOP!!! You're about to be rude, not to mention disgusting.

        That's the message at Northern Kentucky University these days. Working with disabled students who depend on the automatic doors, administrators have launched a “Don't kick the button” campaign.

        Across Greater Cincinnati, disabled people face the same problem: Doors rendered useless because of abuse by the able-bodied.

        Kicks can damage the buttons. Then there's the goop on the bottom of your shoes. How nice for those who must push the buttons with their hands.

Some just being lazy
        “I've noticed sometimes it's kind of sticky, yeah. I don't know if it's from shoes or people throwing pop on it or what,” says Jeff Murray, an NKU student who is paralyzed from the waist down.

Carol Maschinot pushes a button designed to open the door for handicapped persons in the University Center at NKU. (Patrick Reddy photo) | ZOOM |

        To dramatize the problem, NKU administrator Dale Adams sometimes plants his foot on a doorknob, then asks people whether they would want to grab it.

        “It's not that people are trying to be abusive or brutal,” Mr. Adams says. “They just don't understand what they're doing.”

        At the Provident Bank building on Vine Street downtown, chief engineer Tim Nagle always stops people when he sees a kick coming.

        Some have their hands full. Others are just being lazy, he says.

        “It's meant to be a touch pad, not a knee pad or a foot pad,” Mr. Nagle says. “I just don't want an able-bodied person doing something careless to render the system inoperable for someone who really needs it.”

        One who depends on the building's door is Suzanne Hopkins, program director with the Center for Independent Living Options. The agency helps disabled people live on their own.

        Ms. Hopkins was born without arms or legs. She gets inside the building by bumping her wheelchair into the lower of two buttons.

Signs ask NKU students not to kick the door buttons. | ZOOM |

It's not a football
        Recently, the automatic door was out of commission for several weeks because a timing gear had worn down.

        “I'm not able to pull a door open at all,” Ms. Hopkins says. “I'd have to wait outside until somebody walked by and say, "Excuse me, could you open this door for me?'

        “It's embarrassing. I feel like I'm a burden on people sometimes.”

        At NKU, workers occasionally must replace buttons and other parts on automatic doors. They suspect kicking is the cause.

        “I've actually seen a full-grown man kick it like a football,” says Bob Bolce, associate director of the physical plant.

        If people spent a few hours in a wheelchair, they would understand, Mr. Bolce says. He knows this firsthand, because NKU administrators occasionally have navigated the campus in chairs to get the proper perspective.

        NKU student Carol Maschinot uses a wheelchair and has helped plan the no-kick campaign.

        When automatic mechanisms are broken, she has difficulty getting inside.

        Sometimes people see her approaching and try to help out ... by kicking the button.

        “I'm like, "Oh, don't do that!'” Ms. Maschinot says.

        Yeah, folks. Doors aren't footballs. To some people, they're challenges.

       Karen Samples can be reached at (859) 578-5584 or ksamples@enquirer.com.

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