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Comment by CmonDev | Hacker News Reader

Not nearly as annoying as lift/elevator buttons.

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?

There is a persistent myth that some elevators (aka 'lifts' in my part fo the world) have an express mode that can take you to a chosen floor by pressing the door close button in conjunction with the appropriate floor button [1]. As far as I know its false. I try to avoid using elevators, but the ones I do use always seem to have a key slot to allow them to be put into 'privileged' mode.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/17/051017ta_talk_pa...

See my other reply for the perils of an express mode, which the lifts in my building do have (of a sort), and everyone knows about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6326890

You need a paternoster lift:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAjYAfb_HPk

One of the buildings at the university I went to had a Paternoster. Great fun, and rather more rapid that conventional lifts because there is no door open/close cycle to wait through.

The main disadvantage was that it was fairly easy to trip the sensor that detected when a body part was jammed in the opening to the lift compartment. When this happened, the compartments would come so a sudden stop - potentially between floors - until the janitor could be roused from wherever he was sleeping to restart the mechanism.

An anxiety-inducing urban myth foisted on new students was that the compartments inverted as they passed the top or bottom floors. This could be re-enforced by staying in the compartment at these points and doing a handstand as it came back into view. Seen it done.

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