1 Happy St

Following up on Brian's coffee cup dilemma yesterday, I just had an encounter that I'm also looking for advice on.

It seems that whenever I walk through a door and someone is behind me, they are just the wrong distance back so that if I hold the door for them, I have to stand there waiting for them to catch up and then they do that uncomfortable jog up to the door because then they feel bad that you held the door for them and they would have just preferred you hadn't because now they're running and they really weren't in that big of a hurry to begin with. But then if I decide to ignore them and not hold the door, I run the risk of them thinking, "What the hell, man? Just slam the door in my face, why don't you?!"

So the question is, what is the distance where you absolutely have to hold the door for the person behind you without look like a total tool or a total jerk?

And what did they do in Star Trek with those doors that swoosh open and closed? Did you ever just stand there in the doorway with the door swooshed open while you waited for your Vulcan friend to catch up when really all he's thinking is, "The logical thing to do would be to just walk through the room portal and just let me worry about swooshing the door myself. What, just because I've got pointy ears, I can't swoosh my own damn door? Condescending human prick!"