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We have our lift buttons on the outside. You choose your floor, and are directed to one of the 6 lifts available. This seems to confuse every visitor to the building, who will walk into the first open lift (that will have opened for someone else). They spend 5 seconds looking for the buttons, the door closes, and they're stuck going to a floor they never wanted. However, as the buttons are on the outside, the designers clearly thought they would aid things where a large group all want to go to the same floor. Press the special people button, enter how many of you there are, and the lift system will optimise to ensure it doesn't needlessly stop at interim floors if you have filled that lift to capacity, or send you a lift already filled that wouldn't fit your group in. So the trick is to say, even if you are a single rider (lifter?), that you are a party of 14, guaranteeing your lift won't stop at any other floor on the way to yours. An 'express mode', if you will. Problem is, everyone working in the building seems to know this trick, and it does not scale. Whilst it might make the time in the lift shorter, I notice that the wait time for a lift appears longer (from observing those going to my floor who have done the trick before I then select the same floor normally). The real trick then is to use the lifts as they were intended. The irony is that all these 'super busy' types who are slowing everyone up are simply slowing themselves up too. Then again, who was expecting a building full of lawyers and traders to behave like good citizens? |