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Wednesday, March 31, 2004 - 2:20 p.m.

The mystery of the elevators

Riddle me this:

Our office building has five floors -- from the bottom up, it's two parking decks, a level split between parking and office space, and two floors of offices. There are four elevators that serve all five floors. You'd think that, when you push the button for an elevator, one should be no more than a floor away. Of course, that doesn't happen because more than one elevator may be in use at one time. (Though because you can hear them through the doors, you know when elevators are moving, and I rarely hear more than one moving at once.) But the wait for an elevator is sometimes ridiculously long, considering the layout of the building and the 4-to-5 ratio of elevators to floors.

I came back from lunch today and walked into the elevator lobby on the bottom floor, the bottom level of the parking deck (the building is built into a hill so that the middle level is street level in front, but the lowest level is open to the parking lot in the back). I passed a co-worker who had just come down and noticed the doors of one of the elevators closing, which she had no doubt ridden. I pressed the button, and the doors did not open immediately. The elevator was already on its way up to pick up someone.

I wait. And wait. A woman walks in. She's impatient. When an elevator finally arrives, the light on the button turns off but there's a several-second lag before the doors open -- as always -- yet she feels the need to push the button again, as if the light just turned off because it, too, was tired of waiting. Anyway, which elevator opens? The one that I had seen leave. Which means that I walked in as an elevator left, pushed the button as it was leaving to go up, and waited along with three other inactive elevators for that same one to come back down.

I should just take the stairs more often.

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