My wife and I gave our old car to her parents. In the subsequent years, its battery kept dying and we had to go over to their place and jump it. Never happened in the prior 7 years we'd owned the car. The mechanic said nothing wrong with the battery, but suggested there might be a parasitic drain somewhere.
A few days later, we were visiting them. I looked at the car and saw the door closed, but not properly latched and ever-so-slightly ajar. You know, that half-closed thing car doors do when you don't close them hard enough.
It turns out someone, possibly my son, had been not closing the door completely. This did not keep the lights on or cause any other visible sign, as it would in some cars.
After I told them to slam the door fully shut, never a problem again for 2 years and counting.
My wife, bless her heart, leaves everything partially open. Not even just open, but she'll screw the lid on jars just enough where if I pick it up by the top they'll drop. It drives me crazy.
People always think that they are compatible if they share more or less a common understanding in big subjects, but stuff like these really test you.
One of my exes hated onion, and when I look back, this made my life way more insufferable than having to hear the (to me) weird political opinions. "Oh I'd like to have this salad but please no onion, and please don't use a knife that's used to cut onion when preparing!". "I think I smell onion, apparently they ignored the knife comment, can you tell them to pack this and maybe you can eat it back home and I'll just go to the [insert food stall name], so meet in 15 mins there?". Ugh.
I've had a few girlfriends and female friends who "don't like onion". It's incredibly common. I simply never mention onion again and not once have I received a complaint about the presence of onion in pretty much every single dish I prepare. I think it's just the word they don't like.
It would be a complete deal breaker if they actually complained about onion or imagined they could taste it.
Asking nicely and not protesting when they didn't manage is okay in my book, to be honest. That was not the problem. Having to experience stuff like these (everyone has their quirks) regularly and learning to deal with it is the hard part in a relationship, is what I'm saying.
Having to experience weird behaviour on a more or less regular basis is not how relationships are supposed to work, thats what I'm saying. There are spouses out there who treat their partner with respect and love, not like a tool to be used to fix up anoyances in life.
Thats my point. Certain people just love drama, and even want casual online discussions like this one to show how dangerous the world is, and how right picky people are in being right... Drama(queen)s all around, what would our world be without first-world problems...
I've met a lot of women who do stuff like this... I asked one why and she told me it's because they don't want to be a bother. Fully closing the door makes noise, screwing on lids can make it hard for people to open them later. So they don't. They close it just enough and leave the object in that almost there state.
I think this is more an anecdote than anything else. My wife leaves all sorts of stuff open, and it's really because she's not paying attention, i.e. most of the time she's not fully present.
I'm glad to have read this, it gives me a little comfort to see that other people deal with same issues. Sometimes I just close the door for her when she's in the restroom.
I feel like a lot of these habits come from having lived alone for a while after leaving home. I have a lot of habits that I'm 100% certain I didn't do growing up because my mom would tell me not to. I would probably have kept them if I had started living with other people later. My mom on the other hand now does the things she used to tell me not to and I can't help but think that it is related to not caring anymore after living in solitude for decades.
My wife leaves the toilet door open when she's in there, which annoys me. One day I asked her why and she told me she used to do it deliberately when the children were little so she could hear what they were up to, and talk to them if they needed it. It's now just a habit. Makes sense now I know.
Everything, literally everything from the root of this thread until the parent comment applies to my wife too. I am so relieved that I can stop worrying about it now.
I'm getting older and one of the things I started to notice is that men are just there, doing things that are generally... straightforward. I mean I guess posting on hacker news is probably pretty strange to a lot of people - so ignore that.
Anyway, women however, I feel like they build these neurotic behaviors - like learned things that just stick with them forever. Like ouch, the pan was hot, don't do that again, but for EVERYTHING. So by the time they are old, just nothing they do makes any sense, to anyone, even other women.
Reminds me of the stereotype that women will tell you something that happened in the most expansive way possible with all this context that doesn't really matter while guys will just tell you what happened.
I've heard the explanation that men just tend to prefer to think in more concrete terms. "What happened" is sometimes met with a detailed social analysis filled with motivations and states-of-mind about the story that unfolded and sometimes met with some cold facts about precisely what events occurred without any speculation as to why or what impact it had on people, and this tends to split along gender lines. The classic "what are you thinking about" works the same way. Women tend to be thinking about conceptual things like their ambitions or happiness or relationships, whereas men tend to be thinking about concrete things like that one cabinet with the loose hinges in the bathroom.
This is, of course, not a universal rule. It's just an observation about tendencies.
Actually this might rather be coming from an autism spectrum. This work mate, a very fine programmer I must say, starts any point he might have with a few minutes long background presentation. I can't say that I get much value from that intro, but that's his way so I say let him have it. And we're never under that time pressure to need to interrupt him anyway.
I find that everyone has these quirks, regardless of gender. Sometimes it makes the world a more interesting place. Sometimes it's utterly baffling. Like my friend who refuses to use tissues because his parents taught him to blow his nose with a paper towel instead. Maybe we're the weird ones for believing Big Kleenex's ads though!
One gender difference is that when these quirks are presented to men, they're a bit more likely to change to a more sensible method. Women tend to get annoyed about the male tendency to suggest solutions to everything. Annoyance can motivate stubbornness.
IMHO it's less of a bother to have to open a jar and much more of a bother if you pick up a not-fully-closed jar by the lid and then have to clean the kitchen of jam and broken glass, but YMMV...
Agree. Also an issue with juice bottles with lots of deposition, if the cap is not on tight and you forget to check you end up with at best a hand dripping full of juice (if the cap was screwed on but did not seal, so you just got some liquid through the cap) and at worst a repainted wall (if the cap was barely even on, and shaking sent it flying).
My flatmate does this with kitchen cupboard doors, and, most annoyingly, the microwave. She'll open the microwave to stop it, takes her food out and, just ... leaves it open. Then when I close it later it will start up again with nothing inside. Arrrgh!
> My flatmate does this with kitchen cupboard doors, and, most annoyingly, the microwave. She'll open the microwave to stop it, takes her food out and, just ... leaves it open. Then when I close it later it will start up again with nothing inside. Arrrgh!
So? Hit the cancel button when you close it - you have to be right there to close it after all.
TBH, I do this too, because I hate putting in some milk to warm for cereal and getting out warm milk flavoured with and smelling of the curry we warmed last night.
Anytime the microwave oven is used for aromatic food or any meal with flavouring, leave the door open.
Not sure about that. It's normal to open a microwave periodically to inspect, stir the food etc to ensure it is heating evenly. Automatically cancelling the timer each time you open it would be very annoying.
Exactly! If there is any moisture left and it can't dry, it could start to mold.
That's actually a problem with my dishwasher, which can't be left slightly open (it always closes shut), and me being a single, so it takes time to get a full machine. If I want to prevent mold I either have to start the dishwasher half empty (which is counterintuitive) or to collect the dirty dishes outside the dishwasher until enough have accumulated to fill it. But then you have all the dirty dishes lying around. Argh!
Lol. This sounds like my house. My spouse and my nephew (who lives with us) cannot for the life of them ever close any kitchen cabinet doors. They both always leave them ajar, never leaving them fully opening but never fully closing them. It drives me nuts.
Even just installing those stick-on rubber bumpers makes a huge difference. A soft, satisfying "thunk" when you close a cabinet door rather than a horrible bang/clatter.
Both seat and lid should be closed before flushing, to reduce spray. Has the additional benefit of requiring both men & women to lift something before using it.
With my car, trying to lock the doors just doesn't work if one is left open — not always the most obvious failure mode, but it's been enough to get me to notice something's wrong.
> With my car, trying to lock the doors just doesn't work if one is left open
for suburban single family residence dwellers with their own garage, they may not always (or ever) lock the doors while the car is parked in their locked garage.
No car I'm aware of requires this. If the ignition is off and the doors are all closed, the car is, for all intents and purposes, asleep. If anything, doors unlocked may be lower power... as that would disable (or, rather, not enable) alarm functionality.
Tangent, but what's the rationale for car doors requiring slams? They are the only door I know, at least in common, daily life contexts, that require slamming them with the force of Thor to properly close them.
At a guess it has something to do with needing to withstand 70+ mph winds. There needs to be considerable force holding the door against its seals at all times, and in a mechanical latching system this force must come from a spring, which must be charged with energy via a good slam.
However there are minivans with electronically operated sliding doors, which either power the latch allowing you to gently close the door, or (going further) powering the entire closing operation at a button push. I surmise the reason we see it moreso on minivans is because 1) it is particularly difficult to work up enough energy to properly latch a sliding door, due to losses from the 90-degree change in direction at the end, and 2) violently slamming the sliding doors on a minivan is very dangerous to children's fingers.
It's not about wind pressure. It's that the door when properly closed becomes an integral, load-bearing part of the car's structure. In the event of a crash or rollover, an incompletely-closed door makes the car much weaker and less protective of the occupants.
It's about wind pressure only for doors that have the hinge at the back (I think those also have safety systems that prevent them from being opened while the car is moving). For the more common ones that have the hinge at the front, wind pressure will actually keep the door closed.
I'm not sure I buy this - how is load being transferred through the door? Surely not through the rubber seals, those have minimal shear strength even when compressed. That leaves the hinges, which are certainly robust enough, and the latch, which unless I'm mistaken is only designed to secure the door from opening (usually they engage with some sort of rod or peg, which can't transfer torsional or axial force (i.e. the latch is free to slide along or around the peg).
Luxury cars like MB and BMW also have a soft-close door mechanism for the normal driver and passenger side doors. There's a cam that pulls it in the last few centimeters.
I'm not sure how much money I'd pay for it, but it's a nice feature.
> I surmise the reason we see it moreso on minivans is because 1) it is particularly difficult to work up enough energy to properly latch a sliding door, due to losses from the 90-degree change in direction at the end, and 2) violently slamming the sliding doors on a minivan is very dangerous to children's fingers.
There is also a third, dumber reason, at least for cargo van slide-doors. The surface area of sliding doors are large. When the door takes that 90 degree turn and moves very fast towards the vehicle, it is pushing a lot of air into the vehicle. The air in the vehicle has nowhere to go, so it acts as an air-spring, slowing down the door. To properly latch the door, you have to really slam it hard. If the windows are down or an other door is open, the sliding doors latches very easily. I thought I was going crazy when my door was closing easily ... sometimes. Some cargo vans even have vents that allow air to escape, but people tend to cover them because they don't know what it's for. But electric sliding doors also solve this problem, by moving slowly and letting the air escape.
TLDR: if you car door doesn't close, open the window :)
They rarely require a slam. You can soft-close the door, then lean on the outer edge enough to engage the latch.
Often, the door just isn't aligned correctly. Either it's sagged on it's hinges over time, or the latch itself needs a minor alignment/adjustment (Note that even on a lot of new cars, this still helps a lot! Not all manufacturing is perfect). Other times the rubbers can be hard and perished and it doesn't allow the mechanism to engage properly.
My last two (severely low end) cars had a function that opened slightly one window when there was just one door open,for this reason... To allow the last door to close without excessive force.
On one of the cars it wasnt enabled from factory, but I asked the dealership and they enabled it at no cost.
It's fascinating how doors and windows in a house interact with air pressure. The way doors act when a window is closed versus open, how a half-out-of-frame door will open when a door to the garage on the other end of the house is opened, active central air holding an ajar door against it's frame, etc.
The solidness is an indicator of quality. Apocryphally Mercedes used to add lead weights to their doors to get that solid 'thunk'. Nowadays car manufacturers are a little more subtle at it -- there's a lot of engineering that goes into how a car door feels and sounds to give that impression which is very much intentional.
AFAIK a lot of engineering goes into the hinge to make a car door feel heavy. Meanwhile the average person can easily carry two around without too much effort.
Car doors are unlike any other door in your common, daily life contexts. They are not rectangular. They are heavy and float several inches above the ground. They have hydraulics and/or springs, and typically have two fixed points where they will remain open, even in moderately high winds. They have electronics, power windows, crumple zones, and side airbags. They lock remotely. Their latches and handles are very different from other doors.
A car door is like a bedroom door in the same way a MacBook is like a Cray supercomputer. A door is a door and a computer is a computer, but there is significant variance within that category.
I got a new(used) car which has power closing doors - you just bring them close to the car and the motors gently pull them closed.
Luxury feature because you never slam or even shut the doors anymore, they are closed soundlessly.
I didn't know I wanted the feature till I got this car...now I wish all cars had this. I bet I won't feel the same when I have to pay a thousand dollars to get a single motor replaced.
I can only guess:
Probably some vehicle control unit (multimedia/dashboard) thought it had to stay powered on. Door is not fully closed - driver might want to enter the vehicle again any minute and start driving again. better keep the infotainment/vehicle computer in an alive state so the driver experience is not interrupted by a booting system once he re-enters.
A few days later, we were visiting them. I looked at the car and saw the door closed, but not properly latched and ever-so-slightly ajar. You know, that half-closed thing car doors do when you don't close them hard enough.
It turns out someone, possibly my son, had been not closing the door completely. This did not keep the lights on or cause any other visible sign, as it would in some cars.
After I told them to slam the door fully shut, never a problem again for 2 years and counting.