It’s clearly time for me to concede this point, given what you and others have said. You’re right, my situation isn’t universal. I’d have been up, but it isn’t reasonable to expect that everyone would.
Not to mention, did she have any idea how long she’d been in the bathroom, before she broke through the wall? If you lock me in a windowless room without any cues about whether it’s even day or night, my sense of time is going to get kind of iffy after a couple of hours. And many people these days don’t wear a watch because they usually have their cell phone within reach. She may have felt like she was trapped a lot longer, before she freed herself.
The story says she used a three-foot-long pole to help punch her way out. I wonder whether she could have used it to pry out the hinges. It’s unlikely they would be on the other side of the door.
How about if you have your laptop or Kindle and a power adaptor? Maybe happened to have a few Clif Bars in your coat pocket for some unclear reason. You know it might not be so bad! I’ve hidden in the bathroom to read in the past …
So if someone is having a panic attack or is claustrophobic, we aren’t allowed to call their subsequent freak out “over reacting”? No, no, that’s a perfectly normal reaction for someone freaking the fuck out over a non dangerous situation!
I’m not sure what’s wrong with just calling it “having a panic attack” or simply “panicking.” “Overreacting” smacks of “being a fucking drama queen,” like if she had busted a hole in a wall to escape a jammed door in the middle of the work day, after being trapped for 5 minutes, and immediately screamed about suing the company for her pain and suffering, not to mention damage to her manicure.
I’m seriously shocked that anyone thinks a person should sit there trapped rather than mess up some drywall. For f#%^ sakes we’re talking about an actual human here. Stuck. Get out any way you have to. And if you have a bit of a tizzy in the process, why, that’s perfectly understandable. Sheesh!
The things are here to serve the people, not vice versa.
Her account reads like a drama queen. Perhaps she is enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame, or preparing for a lawsuit.
I would like to know if she or the guy who locked up is responsible. Did she ignore his knocking on the door, “Anybody in there?” or did the guy not bother to check since it was late.
Fair enough, I guess. However, while I don’t get panic attacks I have witnessed a few and none of them happen so slowly for someone prone to them. And most certainly not for a claustrophobic attack. ISTM, that after 8 hours she had had enough and went a little overboard rather than “suffering a panic attack”.
I would call someone “over reacting” if their reaction harms or inconveniences an innocent person without good cause.
Pushing an old lady off the sidewalk to avoid a bullet aimed towards you is not “over reacting”, even if it means the old lady now has a broken hip.
Pushing her so you can get to the ice cream trucker fast would be an over reaction.
The woman had been locked in the bathroom for eight hours. Eight hours after having already worked an 8 hour day (or longer). Through no fault of her own. She has no food, no comfortable (or hygenic) place to sit. For all we know, she was on her period and didn’t have any pads on tampons on her. She knows her husband doesn’t know where she is and could be freaking out.
She busts a hole in the wall. The only “person” who is harmed is the evil bathroom who had been holding her hostage. Knocking a hole in the wall is consistent with not only what a dramatic anxious person would do, but it’s also what a testosterone-filled badass would do. If she wants to play up the drama to the press just to convey to the world how bad the felt, more power to her. Hopefully by doing so, she’ll get a nice little check and the building manager won’t be so careless in the future. If they don’t like her “over reaction”, they should have put a little more thought into how they constructed the bathroom.
There’s been a big movement in public buildings (especially malls) away from any door at all on the public washrooms because this is hardly the first time someone has been locked in one. So this “carelessness” is the result of a pretty standard practice until recently. eta: Though you have to make a big modification to the entrance to keep it private, which generally takes up a lot more floor space than a door. I think it’s a little overboard to say the building manager is somehow at fault for how the building was built. He probably didn’t build it.
That’s pushing it, and verges on sexism.
He wasn’t. 
They happen lots of different ways. Like I said, I’ve only had a handful of full-blown attacks, but some of them even happened after the stressful situation was dealt with. They are weird. If you’ve never had one, it’s hard to understand. I didn’t understand them until I had my first in my 20s, and it wasn’t until years later when I had my second one that I realized that first one was a panic attack. Both occurred after the stressor was removed. Then the two or three I’ve had after that were just out-of-the-blue panic attacks with no obvious source. They are weird.
This. The overreaction is that this made national news.
I don’t agree. She’s not saying the woman was weak because she was on her period. It’s just gross to be sitting in a pad or tampon for hours.
Substitute anything a person might urgently want, but not life threading: tampon, certain meds, contacts in too long and starting to hurt etc. Plus, leaving a tampon in over 8 hours is linked to toxic shock, a real, life threatening situation.
“I thought, ‘Ah! This cannot be,’” Perrin told ABC News, describing the initial moment of panic. “It sounds crazy, but I went back into the stall and then washed my hands again hoping to change something.”
She went into the stall and washed her hands… in the toilet? Ew.
The only woman I knew who had TSD forgot about the tampon and had it in for a week.
I was locked in the library where I worked twice as a kid, fourteen, I think, because I had a motorcycle, not a car. First time, I called home because I didn’t have the boss phone number. Mom called the cops, :rolleyes: who found Mrs, Hardcastle, who, bless her, was terribly concerned about me and unlocked the front door. Second time I was smart enough to open the bookmobile garage door, punch the close button and run like hell. It’s damned embarrassing to get locked in, even when your co workers leave five minutes early, announcing that they are doing so, and you want to finish your work.
They need locks that can be opened from the inside, and they need to search the building before they lock up, but she is enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame with great alacrity, and I was embarrassed as hell to be so dumb as to get locked in.
Downtown Washington DC - which means either she took Metro (no car to spot), or was parked in a garage (not visible, possibly not even accessible).
That said, yeah, her husband was really slow to come looking for her.
Why would they have a lock on the door at all?
So thieves can’t infiltrate the building, passing by all the offices and computers, enter the bathroom, and steal the toilet paper. Duh.