Everybody goes up and everybody comes down

[austin_dern]

I don't want it to sound like I spend most of my time thinking of elevators. I think of them often but only briefly, since Singapore is a vertical city and it's hard to go far without riding one. This probably is why Singaporeans eagerly hit a ``close door'' button instead of letting doors close on their own, which might save a whole four seconds on a trip. Multiplied by, say, six trips a day, over the course of the year, and some years have mighty involved courses, that saves two hours and 26 minutes, or about as much time as you save by not watching a Michael Bay movie, which is clearly wise.

But the past week elevator anecdotes have been all over the place. In my building's lobby, I hit ``up'' to find one elevator was stuck on level 2: it had the ``going down'' light, but was clearly not going down by any process other than compression of the soil under the building. There was another elevator waiting on 6, but since the first elevator was apparently ``taking'' the call, I suppose, it wouldn't go.

At a Slow Elevator outside the science library, I got on at the fourth floor (the entrance), and hit down. The Windows-controlled monitor showing the floor number and spinning arrow blinked a moment, then changed the displayed number from 4 to B (the ground floor), and, apparently, decided it was on the ground floor, and left the door closed. Eventually somebody on 6 pressed, and the elevator started going up, spinning the arrow and showing floor numbers 1, then 2. The elevator stopped, and the screen reset and showed 6. I'm amused when a computer can't handle a simple task, but, really.

Over at my office's building, one of the (three) sets of buttons -- the horizontal one, intended for wheelchair access -- in the cab had lost the floor 2 button. Someone put masking tape over the hole and wrote ``SPOIL''. Later in the day, someone punched through the tape, spoiling it per instruction, which showed off the jumbled wires and empty space within. And in the other science library elevator (they're adjacent, but calls to one do not summon the other, part of what makes them so slow), drywall covers all the interiors so the workers doing renovations on level 3 can wheel things in or out without scraping anything permanent. For us mere civilians, someone put up a poster, ``Construction Work In Process: We Are Renovating To Serve You Better. Please Bear With Us.'' By yesterday someone had crossed out ``bear'' and wrote ``bare'' in. By today, that was crossed out again, with ``bear'' written back in. I'm interested in tomorrow.

Trivia: Philadelphia had in 1857 more than 260 factories making cotton and wool goods. Source: Boardwalk Empire, Nelson Johnson.

Currently Reading: The Benchley Roundup, Robert Benchley (Edited by Nathaniel Benchley). It's kind of a comfort read.

Comments

[orv.livejournal.com]

It strikes me that, with all these fancy displays, a bit of IT jargon is losing its relevance. It used to be an elevator controller was the stereotypical example of an embedded, out-of-sight application for an OS, as in:
"Are you going to provide a way to disable the console?"
'Why would you want a machine with no console?'
"Well, what if you're building an elevator controller?"

It's also an example of a technology that's moved into what I call stage three: Overcomplication. My theory is that technological progress can be divided into three categories, thusly:

1. Early adoption. The technology is useful, but still primitive. Lots of user intervention is required. Examples: Manual elevators, 1920s cars with crank-start and manual spark advance.

2. Maturity. The technology has reached the point where it performs adequately, and an average person can use it without thinking about it much. Examples: Relay-logic elevator controllers, 1950s cars with automatic transmissions.

3. Overcomplication. The technology has improved at its basic task about as much as it can, so manufacturers add frills to differentiate their products from others that do the same thing. Examples: Elevators with animated displays, refrigerators with built-in televisions, cars with automatic windshield wipers and built-in DVD players.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's a good and probably useful division of technological stages. Certainly it matches a lot of what we do see.

I wonder if there's something like handphone access to the elevator controls; there don't seem to be obvious ports or panels hiding ports, but if there's a computer there must be a way to program it.

[orv.livejournal.com]

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it's probably done from the machine room at the top of the shaft, but who knows? We probably use more computer power to shuffle us between floors in buildings than we once used to put people on the moon.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Hm ... Might be. There's an array of dry risers and other cubbyholes all over the place too; perhaps one of them has access.

We do use a lot of computing power for what might be regarded as trivial reasons, but then you could say that about a lot of modern society, that it's got enough of everything that it's not worth being frugal. It's a shame in that we lose some clever constructions that overcome tight limitations, but on the other hand, we do get spinning arrows and inaccurate floor numbers. That sounded different before I wrote it.