I have an irrational hatred for elevators. I hate riding in them. I hate looking at them. I hate walking past people waiting for them. In my office, we have six elevators and eleven floors. Usually, that means you don’t wait long for an elevator. I almost always take the stairs down, but you can’t take the stairs up because they lock the doors. Only the lobby and basement doors open from the outside.
For the last two weeks, they’ve been taking one elevator out of service at a time to replace the doors. Yes, I’m serious. Currently, the elevator doors are a golden color, with a column of the same material that runs from the top of the door all the way to the ceiling. These doors are being replaced in the lobby with silver colored mirrored doors that have stupid square patterns etched into them. The first time I saw one, I thought it had been scratched as it opened. They are not, however, replacing the panels above the doors.
So, now our lobby not only has marble walls with patterns that could only be described as six foot tall female genitalia, but it also has silver doors with gold trim. Awesome.
And the elevators are slow. I don’t see how taking one out of service quadruples the wait time, but it does. Let’s do the math here. Let’s say that the time I wait for an elevator is (# of people)/(# of elevators)(# of trips per elevator), or t=p/er. Let’s call the time it normally takes t0, and the time it takes with one elevator out of service as tf (Where ‘f’ stands for you know what). We can reasonably assume that p and r remain constant. If tf=4t0, we do some algebra, and we determine that 4/e = (6/5)/e, or 4=6/5. This is false. Therefore, we have to assume that the elevators defy the laws of physics.
Actually, we should probably assume that t=p/er is incorrect. Since taking 84% of e causes t to increase four fold, there must be something more sinister afoot here than that innocuous equation. I suspect that natural logs are involved.