Does it bother anyone other than me when slackers stop your elevator to go a floor or two?
This morning, I’m trying to get to a meeting and the first step is to ride down to the street from the 25th floor. And things are looking good, because I’m on the elevator alone.
Then, this young, healthy-looking — even athletic-looking — guy stops me on 24, and rides down to 22.
Then, on 20, a young woman (healthy, but not so much athletic) stops me so she can ride down to 17. OK, borderline — but after the young guy, it tries one’s patience.
Back when I worked at The State, which is three stories plus a basement, I never took the elevator. Not because I’m such a health nut but because it irritated me so much if I tried to take the blasted thing from the 3rd floor to the basement, and had to stop two extra times so someone could ride from 2 to 1. (Besides, the elevators at The State were excruciatingly slow — I could easily climb from the basement to 3 before someone could ride it — not air-conditioned, and often smelled of B.O.)
Forgive me for going all religious and self-righteous on those of you not of the same faith, but it’s right there in the Ten Commandments:
Thou shall take the stairs if traveling between one or two floors, barring personal injury, lest incur the wrath of those traveling to the 32nd floor whose trips are delayed due to your laziness.
Other, more modern authorities are stricter, setting two floors, up or down, as the limit.
Frankly, I suspect the thing that caused Moses to lose his cool and smash the tablets probably had nothing to do with any golden calf. It was probably someone violating the above commandment. There’s nothing like trying to get to the bottom of a pyramid when you’re in a hurry to get across the Red Sea, and somebody stops you to go down two floors.
Sheesh.
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You can’t tell how their knees might be feeling.
I’ll bet the windows don’t open, either. Actually, though, I take that back — in Hawaii, it would be beyond madness to have an office building that couldn’t take advantage of the trade winds.
I now have an office with a window I can open (the same one with the transom). I’ve been out in the working world since 1975, and this is the first time I’ve worked in an office with a window I could open.
Our newspaper office is on the second floor of a building. The only way up and down is via an elevator. Makes me crazy. (Yes, we have fire escapes, but you can’t enter the building through them.)
“Does it bother anyone other than me when slackers stop your elevator to go a floor or two?”
No. Besides, what are you in a hurry to do, exactly?
Where are the stairs, and are they safe, especially for women? I would take the stairs at the Richland County courthouse from 1-2 and 2-3, but not from 3-4, because the stairs from 3-4 are in a stairwell, and you never knew who you might run into….
No, we have “climate control” — so the computers stay healthy, not us.
If you’re talking about the elevator up to the Cap City Club, I believe that access to the stairs are controlled by the fire alarm. I don’t think you can open the door to the stairs from the hallways or get out other than on the ground floor. That’s just my recollection from when I worked at Affinity Technology in what was then called the Affinity building 10 years ago.
Try it sometime.
Did the stairwell at the State have passcodes to entry each floor for security reasons?
The Capital Center does. Shooting from the hip without doing your homework?
Homework? You’re kidding me, right. I don’t do homework? No, I just work 24 hours a day.
Seriously, though, I’m not even curious whether that building has barriers to people taking the stairs. If that were the case, and I worked there, I would raise hell about it until the policies got changed. I certainly wouldn’t just meekly accept a status quo that forced me to stop the elevator to go two floors.