I’m in the 4th floor elevator lobby outside of our apartment waiting to take the lift down. The elevator car descending from a higher floor stops and a man gets out in a hurry as I walk on. I hold the open door button. He scurries to the right and sees the two right hand side apartments. He then rushes back across the elevator lobby and is faced with the two left hand side apartments. He comes back to the elevator, smiles at me holding the door open for him and we descend down to the first floor. He gets off, once again turns the wrong way but then finds what he was looking for; the building exit.

I hate to say this is a cultural thing but having lived here a while and in general being not being a fan of cultural based humor (ie, the mistranslated English sign would be funny if there was intent) I’ll go out on a limb and make the gross generalization that many people here just don’t get elevators. There are three symptoms.

The first symptom, is if the elevator stops it must be the first floor. We live in a 30 story building with four apartments on each floor, serviced by two elevators. I take the elevator downstairs maybe 3-4 times a day. Almost every day someone will start to get off on the forth floor thinking it is the first. Granted it is not so obvious what floor the elevator stopped on with the floor number displayed above the door in the elevator.

The second symptom, is the compulsive need to shut the elevator door as soon as possible. The elevator doors where we live are timed to shut pretty quickly already, in fact so quick that more than once we’ve had an elevator open to a screaming toddler whose parent got distracted for a second or two and the door shut behind the child. Nevertheless, the first thing people do when getting on an elevator is hit the door close button. More then once I’ve had people so eager to hit the close button that they’ve pressed even before my body was halfway through the door.

The final symptom is no matter what direction the elevator is travelling when it gets to you, you get on it. This is particularly true on the first floor. The elevator stops, heading down the basement. People wanting to go up, get on anyway, and then are shocked when the elevator does not proceed up (caught me).