My office is on the 11^th floor. In a city like Bangalore, this rare occurrence offers me an amazing view… an entire city spread out below my feet.

 
But then, to reach there each day, I have to take the elevator.

 
Our office block has four elevators. They’re not exactly speedy, but they get the job done. But when you’re on the 11^th floor of a 13 floor building, you are stuck at the mercy of all those souls with offices below yours. On a trip which starts out on my floor, with me as the sole occupant of the lift, hoping to reach ground quickly, there has to be a set of people getting in and out on the 2^nd to 7^th floors. All these floors house the same company. Now why would you wait 3 minutes to take a 20 second elevator ride when you could walk down that single flight of stairs? I just cannot imagine…

See, I have no problem with people taking long elevator rides… Starting out at the 2^nd floor and going to the 6^th or 7^th is still acceptable. But waiting for the elevator just to go from the 6^th to the 7^th? Or even worse… going downwards (in the direction of gravity, where the stairs become really, really easy) for just one floor?

 
According to one friend, in a company like that, There are too many people anyway… they just don’t have enough work. As a result, every elevator ride they take, wastes that much more of time that they’d otherwise just while away in front of the computer. Maybe its time Accenture started laying off people.

 
And some of these people are just plain dumb… They’ll get into the elevator in a large group, and even though they know each other, and know who’ll be getting off at which floor, they somehow contrive to position themselves so that at every floor, the alighting member is as far from the doors as possible, and maximum movement of everyone else. (Maybe it’s an actual phenomenon… something like ‘the bread always falling butter side down’)

 
Even more hilarious is one incident that occurred a week back. Our block happens to have a mezzanine floor and as a result, the floors above it (2^nd floor onwards) correspond to a different floor on the adjoining tower, a fact that only needs to be kept in mind by those employees moving through the connecting floor (7^th on our tower, 8^th on Tower B).

But this chattering female gets on with a friend at floor 6, presses the button for the ground floor, and then asks… “the Ground floor here is the same as that of tower B, right?”

Err… Ground floor? The one that’s usually at the ground level?? That’s common for almost everything???

Sheesh.

In other news, go see Kutt’s and Tvk’s Blogs… guaranteed stitches in your sides.