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Comment by trivo | Hacker News Reader

And then when the elevator door opens, they ask the people inside: "Are you going up or down?" There's an arrow showing that, for Christ's sake.

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The direction is also indicated by the chime sound, which only blind people and YouTube viewers seem to know.

As for button pressing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#As_a_metaphor

TIL! I need to keep an ear open for this.

Yeah and you can flail your head around looking for the arrow or you can just ask. Especially on a busy elevator lobby there might be multiple cars opening at the same time so you cant even tell from the ding/ding-ding

or just point your eyes a few degrees away to look at the dedicated arrows next to each elevator, built for this exact use case, which indicate whether that specific elevator is going up or down?

I have to assume this is a cultural difference and you just don't have those indicators where you live, rather than "slightly moving my eyes is too hard, better make my problem into somebody else's problem"

True but sometimes someone hits a button on the inside by mistake. Or someone was going to get off then decides not to.

Sometimes I think "stupid" questions like these are just a way to break the ice, something that gets used to kindly acknowledge the momentary existence of others in our lives before we continue down our separate paths.

… and the elevator is still going the way it is going, and that way is still indicated by the illuminated arrow.

"Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are."

"Have you stopped urinating in public?"

When did you stop beating your wife?

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