Elevators

Local folks in my building, usually ones that are past middle age, sometimes grab the elevator going up only to take it back down to the ground floor. At first, the 14 seconds that this adds to the process of leaving my apartment kinda irked me. (Typically, they will hit both up and down buttons to hedge, then the elevator stops to pick them up, then we stop again going back down.) I then realized that many of the old people taking the elevator up and then down again grew up in a time of amazing uncertainty and radical change, and that there would be no passing up of any opportunities on their watch to get in a perfectly good elevator passing their floor, whether it's going up or down. And then there's the distinct possibility that some of these guys are still profoundly amazed that the same China that experienced famines and so much upheaval is not a place where an electrical cable closet can move your up 300 feet in the air in like, 14 seconds.