Feb 04 2009
in which american elevators maybe pretend to be british
One of the slightly more annoying things I noticed in England was that all the lifts talked. (Never mind the confusion about which floor is which: “ground floor” I understand perfectly, and I suppose I can go along with the idea that the ground floor is then floor 0 and what Americans consider the second floor is then floor 1 and so on, meaning any basement levels are floor 01, floor 02, and so on. This isn’t a problem except at UEA where the main part of campus is connected together by raised walkways and in these areas only cars and service deliveries and the like actually use the ground…which means that the “ground” floor in many, but not all, of these buildings is actually the one you enter from the walkway, and not on ground level at all.) Other annoyances aside, for some reason for sure every lift at UEA, and I think those elsewhere (I honestly can’t remember if this was true of the airports but I imagine it was, and I didn’t use much in the way of lifts otherwise), had to talk to you like all the time, in this computerized female British voice, telling you important things like “Doors closing” and “Lift going down”. So for a single ride up two floors, say, you’d get to hear “Doors closing. Lift going up.” *a couple seconds’ precious silence* “Floor two. Doors opening.” Because…it’s handicap-accessible and therefore it’s trying to tell blind people what’s going on? Because England is even more litigation-happy than the US is and maybe people have got hurt in elevators because they couldn’t figure out themselves that the doors were closing? I honestly can’t imagine.
The actual point here is that while I was gone, one of the elevators in a building on the UAA campus was extensively renovated; I can’t say whether it works better or faster (it was a real clunker before, though, and very old), but it sure looks nicer inside. Also it talks. It’s got a computerized female voice (American accent, naturally) that tells you your floor and whether it’s going up or down; it’s not as much as the lifts at UEA, but it’s close enough I wonder if this is just a new thing in making elevators more accessible than they already are (although that begs the question, why choose those messages instead of “doors closing” since the others are much easier to figure out by yourself?) or if, I dunno, some engineer just wanted to copy Britain.
Mostly it makes me think of Douglas Adams’ talking doors on the Heart of Gold.
