Elevators and the Humans who Use Them

Like most ubiquitous technology, elevators are often ignored. But there would be no skyscrapers without them. There would be no tightly-packed awkwardness, no dusting of claustrophobic fear. Tune in to learn about the psychology and science of elevators.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
you wrote an elevator this morning. It's true, I did.
You wrote two elevators, two banks of elevators. Do explain
because I only road one. Well, see, you're coming in

(00:26):
off of Marta, and so you're coming in UM at
the ground level, so you only take one bank. But
if you drive into our office building, you have to
take two different sets of elevators. I had twice, twice
the fun twice. H See, I took an escalator up
from Marta and then the elevator up in our building.
I could have taken the Marta elevator, though I think
it doubles as a bathroom, so I tried to avoid it.

(00:48):
I was about to say, it's it's part of our
public transportation system, right Marta, and I will confirm that
it does smell like you're in the elevator banks. Now,
in this episode, of course, we're going to talk about elevators,
and it's not just gonna be uh, We're not just
gonna focus on the mechanics and all that. Though the
mechanics are pretty fascinating when you break them down. We're
going to get into the psychology of the culture of

(01:09):
the elevators of the past are possible elevators of the
future a little bit. But to kick things off here,
I want to ask you, and then I'm gonna ask
myself the same question. Name me a fictional elevator or
an elevator scene that particularly um excited you, and a
real life elevator that you loved and or feared. Mm okay,

(01:31):
all right. So I debated about this thing. Because I
was thinking about this, I thought, well, I think that
the one that made the most impact on me is
probably the elevators from the Shining because blood gushes out
of them. But you don't really spend much time in
the elevators, so but it's just the idea that blood
would come gushing them. And then that that thought me too.

(01:52):
That that got me to thinking about how in a
lot of UM movies, at least, elevators are are the
scene for awful things happening? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there's
usually some sort of I know, heist going on or
in sil lambs. Yeah yeah, there's that, Remember there's the
blood dripping down from the hatch. I totally forgot about

(02:14):
that elevator scene. But that is that is a great sequence, terrifying, awful, awful.
So I started to think about how that really feeds
into sometimes our phobia is about elevators, because really, mean,
what is it but a little metal canister that you
seal yourself into. Um, which leads to again fears because
I was thinking about a building called the West and

(02:35):
Peach Tree in Atlanta, and it's a very tall tone
guess the West And this is the one that looks
like a big paper towel rolly, a glass paper towel
roll has a revolving restaurant at the top, the Sun
Died restaurant Us Atlanteans take out of town. Guess yeah,
because like we look at us, we're moving around as
we eat um. But the terrifying thing is that their

(02:57):
elevator is glass, and it's you're going up on the
side and you see um. If you if you're from
like me who has a fear of heights, then obviously
you began to see the landscape unfold in front of you,
and you began to in chup more towards the door. Yea,
those are some some interesting elevators for sure. Um they're

(03:17):
the ones at the Weston. I tend to really enjoy
the ride, but my wife she uh, she just kind
of looks at the door and try because she and
she's not crazy about the glass, I think. And also
she's a little bit claustrophobic and an elevators sometimes so
um so. But we'll discuss the the psychology of of
elevators a little more as we continue. For my own part,

(03:39):
the real world elevator that I often think about, I
have to go back to my college days in Knoxville, Tennessee,
the University of Tennessee. There is a dorm there called
mel Rose Hall, and I think mel Rose Hall is
still there. I don't know if it's still a dorm
or if it's been incorporated into something else. But when
I went there, it was it was really cool because
it was the It was a door arm exclusively for

(04:01):
international students and socially introverted people like myself who you know,
upperclassmen who weren't leaving campus to find exciting apartment living,
but but did a room to themselves in a dorm.
When you got off the elevator banks. Did it say that?
Did it say Melrose Hall for the International students essentially introverted,

(04:23):
but it was they updated it in recent years because
when I went there, the beds were all really short,
like left over from World War two, so I had
to I had to like sleep with the mattress in
early weird position because it had a footboard and I'm
I'm fairly tall and uh and there was no air conditioning,
so during the summer you just had to sweat it
out or live exclusively at night, or go down and

(04:44):
sleep and like the one or two refrigerator and regreated
basically refrigerated um wreck rooms, and it had this ancient
elevator that this dorm was not that tall. I think
it was three two or three floors above ground. But
one of the things that made it awesome was that
there were two basements. There was a basement where there
was just a lot of their offices and dorms. Some

(05:06):
people actually lived in the basement, and then there was
a sub basement. And to this day I wish I
had found a way talk to somebody and found a
way to visit the sub basement, because I love the
idea the idea of of there being an extra subworld
down there, and like, what does it consist of? There
are no dorms down there or are there what kind
of strange creatures uh lived down there in the sub

(05:28):
basement of Melrose Hall. I don't know. Uh. And it
also had a little gate, the old school gate you
had to pull across, and the clunky buttons that they
look like they're they're part of a furnace or something.
So I I loved that elevator. I have no idea
if they still have it. Maybe they replaced it. Sure
they upgraded it probably took out the great it was.

(05:48):
It was indeed great. Though in the g R E
A t since fictional elevators, I always come back to
one of my favorite movies, John Carpenter's Big Trouble in
a Little China. In this particular movie, you keep encountering
elevators that only go down, and I'm all, I've always
been inspired and uh and fascinated by by sub worlds

(06:09):
and UH and underground spaces and in dis sense and
so uh, these elevators that that only go down are
always just really fascinating to me. UM and Big trom
a little China. There's a scene where they they're taking
it down, ends up, the elevator goes into water and
they have to escape and swim out through this kind
of watery dungeon hell environment. And then there's another elevator
they take straight down, which is plush and it looks

(06:31):
like a really fancy Chinese restaurant on the inside. And
there's a wonderful scene where all the heroes are packed
into this little elevator, and you have sort of a
cliche elevator scene where you know, people are just standing
there doing nothing, kind of awkwardly. But then there there's
this they're also having all this magic potion that they
just consumed. It's kicking in and so they're beginning to
feel kind of magical and invincible. It's it's a wonderful scene.

(06:55):
But it you mentioned all the scenes that take place
in movies involving elevators, and and when you do think
about them, the elevator becomes this interesting space from just
a storytelling because it is that it is a space
between is a space where you can encapsulate your characters
and force them to have a little small talk and

(07:16):
maybe you know, push the plot a little a little forward. Uh.
It's a great way to transition between one set and another. Uh.
And then you get into all the high jinks of
climbing out of elevators, climbing on top of them, becoming
stuck in an elevator. Classic, um, classic way to do
a very limited episode of a TV show. I wonder
how And it's always like a woman giving birth and

(07:37):
an elevator. That's a That's another big one that's always
happening on TV. So it is, Yeah, I miss that one.
I feel like there's a super cut online on YouTube
somewhere of just scenes of women who are pregnant in elevators,
So I'm not going to check that out. Um. You know,
as we're discussing this, this actually reminds me of the
movie Inception, which we bring up every once in a while.

(08:00):
It there is a great narrative technique now that I'm
thinking about it, of his psyche being in line with
an elevator. So when he plunges into his dream world
Leonardo DiCaprio's character, then he descends in the elevator, particularly
when when he has like a very tragic memories that
he's rebusiting. So yeah, I mean it turns out that

(08:22):
the elevator is is a great metaphor for as you say,
that in between spaces and life, and it's something that
we do take for granted, but it is so fascinating
to me because really you're talking about I don't know,
maybe a twenty to thirty second ride on an elevator,
and yet it can sometimes be the most awkward ride.

(08:42):
And it is one of these great things is it's
a microcosm for really how we act in social situations. Um,
there's so much going on and just that little span
of time and when you really think about it, I mean,
what is an elevator, But it's really a box suspended
by ropes and a counterweight. And remember that, you know,
for us it's not a big deal. But if you

(09:02):
were in the early twentieth century and you are an
office worker in one of the beautiful, beautiful, new sparkling skyscrapers,
this would be a really weird experience for you. And
you know you wouldn't you'd have to deal with getting
into this this metal box that's going to go up
this narrow little shaft and what that meant to you psychologically.

(09:23):
And I wanted to point out that This is about
the time, at least in the forties when skyscrapers really
became prevalent. Yet you began to see musaic or music
being piped into elevators because what they're trying to do
there is psychologically set you up for this feeling that
everything is okay, and they give you the most bland,
vanilla music to pipe in. Uh So, you know, again,

(09:46):
we take that stuff for granted, but if you are
someone in that time period forties, this would be kind
of a weird thing. And by the way, the music
playing in the background there it was was tracked two
from the nineteen seventy four music LP known to collectors
as the Blue Album. So, yeah, you don't see music anymore,
or at least I have an encountered music and forever

(10:07):
on on board and l elevator. Now they try different
tactics to try and make you, um think about something
other than the tiny suspended box and a shaft that
that is your environment. Yeah. I read somewhere that the
music became so associated with elevator rides that they go
out rid of it because it was just reminding people
that they were in an elevator. Yeah, I mean, you
still see it in movies. I think people still reference

(10:31):
that the idea that you know, it kind of drives
home the awkwardness of an environment where it's like you're
standing right next to a total stranger and there's funky
music playing like this but not but not real funky music,
but like music acts, which is kind of the uncanny
valley of music. Anyway, this driving home the awkwardness and
artificiality of your setting. I love that. And now I'm

(10:52):
thinking about a robot just staring back at me, vehicing
in in in the form of music, which really that
is what the old music was like. Um okay, So
before we go and give you guys a little bit
of history, um of elevators and get then go into
the psychology, we did want to cover something really important,
and that is the door closed button. Yes, the door

(11:12):
closed button, which I think we've all hit it at
least once, probably ten twenty times in a row. You
know that that feeling where you did I get when
I've I've I've arrived on the train, I hurry up
the escalator. I walked in through the front door of
the building and then there's an elevator already arrived on
the on the ground floor just waiting for me. So

(11:32):
I get inside and I'm the first person in there.
Now at this point, I want those doors to shut
because if they don't, like eight people are going to
show up and they're all going to like different floors,
and we're on the floor. We on the tenth uh
somewhere up there. Yeah, well, I don't know why I
can't remember that I pushed this button. Every day I've
been reminded that we were on the fifteenth floor, technically
the fourteenth because you know, they skipped, because that would

(11:55):
be unlucky. Yeah, So anyway, Um, you know, I rushed
onto the elevator and I start pushing that door closed
button and it seems to take forever, and I always
think it's in the past. I was just thought, well,
they don't. You don't want it to be a situation
where you just push that button and it slams shut
like a like guillotines, twin guillotines. You know, that would
be dangerous. You would need some sort of delay. But

(12:15):
it never really occurred to me that the button does
not work at all, or at least probably does not
work at all. Yeah, it probably doesn't because it turns
out that buildings that were built, particularly from the nineties
and onward, they are not usually keyed so that the
door button works. Usually there they are just in case
of an emergency. So the door closed button is really

(12:38):
only going to work if you have a key for
the elevator. So I just won't want everybody to know that,
because if you've ever been frustrated and said, why won't
the door close? And also it felt a little bit
of a fool and a jerk because you know, there
was a huge amount of people that were stampeding towards
you as you were pushing the door close, and it's
all for not yeah, And then sometimes I mean really,

(13:00):
but occasionally it will be someone I know out there.
And also I'll go to push the door open button
and it won't work or something, and then I feel
like a jerk because they're thinking I was frantically pushing
their clothes button to leave them on the bottom floor.
And people get kind of been out of shape about
their their elevator situation. Um has pointed out in some
of the resources we were looking at, including the fabulous

(13:22):
article Up and then Down the Lines of Elevators by
Nick Palm, Garden a two thousand and eight New Yorker article,
which is about a thousand pages long course since the
New Yorker article, but it's excellent. It's like a it's
like a mini novel about the history of the elevator,
the culture of the elevator, and one particularly harrowing example
of someone trapped in an elevator for I believe, forty
one hours. Yeah, well we'll we'll mention him in a moment.

(13:44):
But it's a you're right, it's set up really great
because they take this guy, Nick White, the guy that
was trapped, and they use that as a reference point. Right.
But one of the points that the Palm Garden keeps
coming back to is that in some of the people
interviews keep discussing, is that we hold elevator to this
different standard, uh than we do anything else. Like I
take the train to work, and if I have to
wait twenty minutes on a train, it's it's just kind

(14:07):
of part of it. It's smarta so I just you know, whatever,
it's just gonna be a slow ride. And then oh
I'm next to somebody that's that's either a stranger or
kind of awful. That's just public transportation, No big deal
if there's a delay, all right, this is part of
the experience on an elevator. I expect to wait no
more than thirty seconds. I expect to ascend and pretty

(14:27):
hopefully directly to my floor, which I'm told again is
the fifteenth floor. And and I don't technically, Yeah, and
if any of these things get messed up, I get
a little bit out of shape about it. Yeah, And
and that's what it's so interesting when you look at
trying to actually engineer a decent set of elevators. And
we'll get more into that, but let's talk about the

(14:48):
Otis Elevator Company, because this really is the gold standard
in the industry. Yeah, you've all been seeing the word
Otis inside your elevators all your live and uh. And
I never really thought about it beyond and just making
a quick reference in my mind to old Andy Griffith's episodes,
you know where you had to Ovis the Drunk, and
I imagine him on an elevator. And that's kind of
the end of it. But they are the elevator company

(15:11):
in the United States and one of the major players globally. Uh.
Most of their work these days isn't even in the
United States. They're they're going to uh to Asia and
the Middle East, and they're they're advising and installing elevator
systems in these magnificent high rises that that everyone you know,
freaks out about. On the internet, everyone's you know, always
sharing a picture of either the newest skyscraper under under

(15:34):
construction or the plans for this elaborate skyscraper that they're
gonna build in the desert somewhere. And uh, of course,
any time you're designing a building like that, anytime you're
looking to create to create something like that, elevators are
an essential part of it. I mean, without elevators, we
would not have skyscrapers because you need a way for

(15:54):
um able bodied people to reach any floor in pretty
uh you know, pretty been a pretty a short amount
of time. And then you also need um disabled individuals,
individuals who are not up to multiple So just for
it to make sense at all, you have to have
an elevator system. And it's a particularly an interesting vision
business now with the skyscrapers and the tallness of them,

(16:17):
because you know, basic physics will tell you that if
you reach beyond a thousand feet up in cabling for
an elevator system, that's about the top of what you
can get there, because otherwise your cables will snap. So
you've got a bunch of engineers working on the spots
because a lot of these buildings are much higher than that,
especially if you look at something like the Burge. So
there's some really good media problems to work on for

(16:41):
engineers and mathematicians. Um. But before we start looking more
at the modern systems, let's talk about Alicia Graves Otis.
He founded the company Otis Elevators in eighteen fifty three
when he figured out an operating system that could prevent
free falls and passenger elevators, which is always nice because
the bay it's the idea of an elevator is pretty ancient.

(17:02):
The basics of hauling a box up, I mean that
dates back to you know, to the ancient Greeks. Well, yeah,
it read something to you about the first century BC.
Romans would operate lifts using pulleys with humans, animal and
water power. So yeah, it is a very simple process
if you think about it. But yeah, it wasn't until
we really had the safety features in mind that we

(17:23):
could and also the the ability to build multiple skyscrapers
that it really became a thing. Yeah, and then in
Otis introduced the automatic elevator system, and that eliminated the
need for operators. So no longer did you get into
the elevator, at least in most office buildings, and was
there an attendant there. Now, that did introduce an element

(17:45):
of randomness, because before this you had someone in the
elevator who knew where you were going and knew sort
of the traffic patterns of people and would call that
out to the operators. So it was easy to anticipate traffic.
But when they moved to the automated system, it was
a little bit more of of um, okay, well nobody

(18:06):
knows really what the traffic patterns are anymore, and people
had to wait a little bit more. Yeah, it was
apparently in the nineties we obviously saw that shift from
elevator operators to operator less elevators, which instantly makes me
think of Madman. Um, yeah, I can't remember do you
watch mad Man? I've caught it before, I haven't seen
all the season's will they make a lot of use
of the elevators because they work in a high rise,
so there's a lot of room for scenes where individuals

(18:29):
encounter each other awkwardly or well generally awkwardly in the elevator,
but then also some excellent scenes. There's one in particular
where Draper goes to take the elevator down and the
doors open to just an empty shaft, and it has
a lot to do with I mean, it's a thematically
with what's going on in the show at that point.
But but but it's it's a fascinating scene. And likewise,

(18:53):
there's generally, i think, at least up until now, in
the show, there's always an elevator operator. So I'm kind
of looking forward to the point when the elevator operator
is no longer present because I guess it's kind of
an old fashioned building, uh that they're they're hanging onto
that tradition, and I kind of want to see Draper's
face when that goes away. That's kind of interesting to
you how that the tails with the changing social ways

(19:17):
at that time, because you can kind of think of
the attendant as the chaperone, and uh, you know that's
sort of because you could say, very um controlled relationship
is flying away during that time, right the sixties, and
people are beginning to be freer. So again, here here's
the elevators, a microcosm of society in which you know,

(19:38):
no longer as a chaperone there and anything can happen
in an elevator, right, and now, as we'll discuss a
little later, where in an age where we see that
amount of freedom vanishing more and more in the elevator,
we see technology taking over to the point to where
we feel just like, where at the whim of whatever
mysterious mechanical force is controlling this magic box? Yeah, and

(19:58):
so in there you go with the door closed button, right,
that's just an illusion of free will, right right. One
of my favorite things that I stumbled upon when we
were researching this is an old clip from a Candid
Camera show. You remember that show? Yeah, This is where
they would you know, kind of a forerunner of reality shows. Um,
kind of like what was the show Punked? I think

(20:18):
with the MTV things several years Yeah, yeah, where they
would prank people. You know, it's just a prank show
they do, and some of it bordered on what we
would now call almost performance art or theater everywhere kind
of shenanigans where you're creating something weird in a public space.
And then seeing how people react to it. Yeah. So
I mean, actually, and its purest format, it really is

(20:40):
kind of a social experiment because nobody was doing them
before that. And so you had this candid camera crew
set up basically basically confederates, and we've talked about confederates before.
These are people who are in on an experiment or
a joke. And what they did is they filmed an elevator,
a bank of elevators. They had I don't know, like
five different confederates go into an elevator and then a

(21:01):
person who's not in on it and go in and
observe what's going on. And quickly you could see that
people would react accordingly, like they would feel the pressure
of those around them to do the right thing socially.
So what I mean is that if five Confederates went
in and they all turned around and faced the wall,

(21:21):
which is an unusual thing to do in an elevator,
the person will look around and then join them, right
And some of these they would sort of hold out
at first, but then they would succumb to the group
think and look at the walls. And it's it's fascinating, yeah,
because there's this sense of you know, conformity and wanting
to to look like you know what's going on. Like
I've been in We've all probably been in elevators before.

(21:42):
We have a door on both sides. I particularly seem
to to encounter these in hospitals for some reason. I
just just because some of the weird floor layouts that
are involved, and there is this kind of confusion that
takes all which door is going to open. Not only
do I need to know which way I'm going, and
there's that sort of basic directional survival instinct in your mind,
but you also don't want to look like you don't

(22:03):
know which doors though you know you want to look
you want to appear in control. You want to feel
in control in this thing. You don't want to look
like a rube. And that's what's so funny about this
candid camera clip, because the Confederates continue to turn, will
turn to the right, and then the guy turns to
the right, and then they turn, you know, to the opposite,
to the left, and so on and so forth. Or

(22:25):
they they all are wearing hats and they take their
hats off and he takes his hat off. So again
microcosm of what's going on socially and the pressures that
we feel to conform. And it was just a really
elegant little social experiment that was conducted by candid camera
of all people. We're talking about the psychology of elevators
at this point. So there are a few different factors
that are mandatory and discussing our mindset inside of this

(22:47):
magic box. The first of which, of course, is we
left on earlier wait times. How long is this ride
going to take? Because even if you're in there alone,
you don't want to be there too long, and and
and and this is actually the sort of thing that
elevator strategists and elevator designers are are very key to understand,
and it varies from culture to culture. But in the
United States, thirty seconds, like that's as long as anyone

(23:10):
is tolerant being on an elevator, And this is really important.
It sounds kind of random, right, thirty seconds, so what's
the big deal? But it turns out that UM office
space is far more desirable if they can deliver people
in that thirty seconds or less timeframe. So you want
to have a good office space that that can deliver

(23:32):
this UM. And what's interesting about this is that when
you get out of an office situation and morans to say,
like an apartment building situation, people are much more forgiving,
so you can add another ten or fifteen seconds onto
that in an apartment building. In an apartment building, yeah,
because people they have their their their personal effects. There,

(23:54):
it's more about life going on and less this is
a job. I need to get where I'm going. I
don't have time for your job. It reminds me though.
Another another college elevator thing was another dorm and I
was in was one called North Carrick In in the
University of Tennessee, and this one was I think I
was on the tenth floor of this particular dorm and

(24:14):
it was awful because we had two elevators serving the
entire building. And the white times were just colossal unless
you were like you're gonna be you know, it was
the middle of the night or something or some weird time,
but the morning hours, afternoon hours, like key traffic times
of the day, it was just a colossal weight. The
door would open and it would already be packed, and

(24:35):
you end up just taking ten flights of stairs, uh,
you know, in the summer and just totally exhausting yourself
and sweating all over the place just because the elevators
were that bad, and like nobody wants to encounter that
like that just made this's just we have no tolerance
for it. Well, you know, and every once in a
while you will encounter an elevator bank like that, right,
And what it's doing is that it's it's a it's

(24:56):
not cross referencing any of the data that we'll talk
about later, it's not very sophistic caated. It's basically just
saying I'm going to stop at every stop that's going up,
load people up, and then I'm gonna go back down,
and I'm gonna stop at every single floor. So it's
just sort of a single function elevator. Yeah. In the
New Yorker article that we were looking at, he interviews
a man by the James Fortune, who's pretty much the

(25:18):
the top class elevator advisor strategist designer. Gets into all
of all of these questions of you know, how are
we gonna lay this out from maximum affecient efficiency and uh,
and some of the things they discussed where things that
I had never really thought of, like, for instance, you
want to cut down as much as possible on Florida
floor um travel, you know, because that the idea is

(25:43):
something like, even in our building, where I know that
you cannot travel between floors via the staircase because of
the lock system. It's set up so that if you
want to take the stairs, you better be going to
the ground floor. There's no using it to go in
between floors. It's just part of the safety system here.
So I'll see individuals who work for a business that
occupies two different floors in this building. I'll see them

(26:04):
go from one floor to the other, and even though
I rationally know that they have no choice but to
do that, I still have this really judgmental voice in
my head. It's like, come on, lazy, take the stairs.
That's the matter with you. I guess it's a holdout
from from my college days and that awful dorm. It's
funny in that New Yorker article, uh, I think that
the author talks about how that's really infuriating as well,

(26:24):
and I believe that his perspective is like, Okay, you're
gonna go get on the StairMaster for an hour after work,
but you won't take the stairs. Now. Of course, not everybody,
can you know, has that luxury for the next with
a bunch of files or some coffee right right, or
maybe you have something physically going on that prevents you
from doing that. But you're right, mathematicians cannot stand it.

(26:46):
They hate that because that is an X factor that
they can't account for because they have all these probability um,
you know, scales that they can rely on. But that's
the one thing that will throw them off, because how
can you can account how can you account for that? Yes,
some of the other real city he goes into. For instance,
if you have a hotel and you have a cafeteria,
or you have a check in on a second floor,

(27:08):
that floor better be accessible via an escalator or likewise,
for a high traffic um subfloor. For instance, when we
were in Minneapolis for the educational talk we gave, I
noticed that the like the bottom three floors were all
connected via escalators and uh, and I realized now that
is because they didn't want traffic, high traffic between those

(27:29):
three floors monopolizing the elevator banks, that's right. And they
only because they had a very small amount of elevator banks, right,
it was a pretty small amount for a tall building.
And that's another thing. Architects don't want to seed a
lot of square footage two elevators because that's going to
decrease the profits on the amount of office space for
hotail space that they can rent out. So they have
to make it as small of space and as efficient

(27:50):
as possible. And they also have to take into account
personal space, which is tied into culture. We'll talk a
little bit more about that. How close am I willing
to get the person in the elevator with? Yeah. Edward Hall,
who pioneered the study of proxymix, called the smallest range
less than eighteen inches between people intimate distance. Now, this

(28:11):
is then the point at which you can sense another
person's odor and temperature. And the thing is that Americans
typically like to be at least two point three feet
away from from one another, so they don't want to
get to the point where they can smell you or
feel your body temperature. Yeah. I mean, even in the
United States, you see a certain breakdown between say New

(28:32):
York City and everywhere else. You know, like if you're dining,
say in a in a New York restaurant versus elsewhere,
like like you're in Atlanta, you go to a restaurant
you expect to have a certain amount of space between
you and the other diners. You expect the table to
be at the fair, you know, the fair distance across.
But like you go into a lot of New York
eateries and you are going to be they're gonna be

(28:52):
elbows bumping, You're gonna be looking down the shirt of
the person the right way in front of you. It's
just there's just a different proxy many rule in New
York City. Uh, then there isn't in the rest of
the country. Yeah, And it turns out that in uh,
the United States, at least, you can sort of infringe
on the two point three feet. You can go about

(29:14):
two feet in with Americans and and still be okay
with it. You can jam that elevator and as long
as everybody has two feet, they're okay with it. But
as you say, like you know, there are different rules
in different places, and in Asia, you could double pack
that elevator and people would be fine because they don't
have that much of a need for distance. Right. And
you see that, you see that you know elsewhere like
public transportation, Um, you see that in the difference between

(29:36):
the Japanese subway system and then public transportation here in
the States. How comfortable are people willing to pack? Now,
I've certainly been on some Martyat trains before where it's
just like sardines in there, but everyone is is visibly
upset by the situation. Yeah, yeah, especially in the summertime
when the cars air conditioning isn't working. Um So again

(29:57):
this is pointing more toward cultural nor rooms, right, what
is what works out for each culture? And there's a
really great article in the Wall Street Journal and they
have profiled in Otis elevator mathematician Teresa Christie, and she
tries to account for all the different cultural aspects as
well as as everything else that's involved in getting an

(30:20):
elevator to run smoothly. And so she was saying that
in the hotel in say Mecca in Saudi Arabia, she
now has to account for the fact that people are
getting ready to pray at least five times a day,
so she has to make sure that those elevator banks
can respond to those high traffic times. Yeah, I mean

(30:42):
certain that's certainly a factor that is going to be
involved in any of these Middle Eastern high rises that
are always, you know, making the news. Neither in construction
or in planning, and then she was saying that in Japan, uh,
there's a psychological element to waiting, so, um, they want
to know when their elevator is coming. So in Japan,

(31:03):
the light over your perspective elevator lights up even if
it's not there yet. And the author of the Wall
Street Journal likened it to a nod of acknowledgment from
a busy bartender, which I thought was great because if
you've ever gone up to the bar and it's completely
slammed and you feel that frustration until you get noticed
I hear, am I do? I am? I not classy

(31:23):
enough looking and it's because of me, And yeah, you
can get a little stressed out about it. So I can.
I can imagine that you you get to the elevator banks,
you want to know an elevator is coming, and so
they're set up to deal with that. Yeah. So those
are just some of the cultural aspects of it. Um. No,
we probably should mention Nick White real quick. This is

(31:43):
the guy that was trapped in the elevator in hours, Yes,
and his his story is covered in various articles across
the net, uh, and it serves as kind of the
the narrative backbone of Palm Gardens two tho eight article,
which again either recommend everyone read because it's it's brilliant.
But yeah, he what he he worked at a business

(32:05):
week I think it was. Yeah, and uh and the
elevator system there was a little archaic. I think they
had four elevators, or at least they were there were
four on the video camera. Yeah, so he's he's at
work and he I think he goes down for smoke
and then he's coming back up. It's like a Friday evening,

(32:25):
let's say five o'clock or something a minutes later in
the evening. Yeah, so he's going down for the smoke,
and what happens, Well, you know, I think that he
was traveling up to the forty third floor and he
must have made it up to well, he definitely made
it up to the thirteen floor, because I believe that's
where it stopped. And so he doesn't freak out right away.
He starts calling the emergency button. Yeah, why why you

(32:47):
do again? There's a button there for the emergency, so
you push it. No one, no one, nothing zero. So
the video camera, sorry, the security system that you see
the video footage from this is pretty fascinating because they
speeded up over that forty one hours and you see
him pacing, you see him lying down, you see him
fiddling with his cigarettes because at first he wants to

(33:07):
be the model employee and not smoke in the elevator,
you know, even though he's definitely feeling pretty stressed out
at this point because hours are going by, and then
he begins to have aural hallucinations, right, because he's hearing things.
I mean, you're talking about we talked before of this
on the on on the podcast. You have a limited environment.

(33:28):
Our brains need more stimulation than that. So they start
over analyzing everything and eventually they start interpreting data that
isn't actually there, right, and you know, twenty hours past,
thirty hours past, you know, he's getting dehydrated, he hasn't
eaten um, and of course this hallucinations are coming on,
and he begins to think that this is a tomb,
that this is that he's going to die. This they're

(33:49):
going to open the doors, because yeah, he's he's tried
pushing the button, nothing's happened. He's pride open the doors
and it's just a solid wall. And I think he
sees thirteen scrawled there in, which is also pretty ominous.
That doesn't help. And uh, and of course he's seen
enough movies to know that he should try to open
that little hatch in the ceiling, but he can't because
in real life, surprise surprise, climbing on top of an

(34:12):
elevator is incredibly dangerous, so they do not want you
to do it. It's bolted from the outside. That's so
that if someone needs to get in and help you out,
they can, But it prohibits people from potentially killing themselves
by climbing on the roofe well, because apparently, and it's
not gonna surprising me, righty. At some point in history,
elevator elevator writing became a thing and people day like

(34:33):
elevator surfing. Yeah, yeah, elevator surfing. And you've got those
counterweights going by, which can decapitate you. So has for
good reason the lock those It is only for emergency situations,
and he's in an emergency situation. He still can't do
anything about it. But yeah, I feel just bad for
this guy because the elevator kind of broke him. Yeah,

(34:54):
forty one hours passes, he gets out. He asked for
a beer he's disoriented. Yeah, he didn't know what day
it is. He doesn't really know how long he's been
in there totally, and and it it kind of ruins
his life. Yeah. Yeah, there's this job of fifteen years
that he held he's let go from. He's obsessed and
angry about it. He doesn't know why people didn't come

(35:15):
and find him. Why because here's someone who's he just
went out for a cigarette break and he went just
there like somebody was setting there walking by and just
did not notice that there was only ever one individual
inside of that car. And it's sometimes they were laying
down for hours at a time. So, yeah, you totally
sympathized with this man's breakdown because it was really dealt

(35:38):
a foul card on this one. Yeah, and it's a
it's funny. I believe it's in the that up and
down article, um or one of the articles that we
read at least um it may be another one, but
in one of those articles they talked to him about
He's like, well, of course I still have to use elevators,
and yes, I just still tried to distract myself. But
I thought about that, you know, when I go into

(36:00):
my own elevator bank. You know, you've got the Captivate
At least in our office, we've got the Captivate screen
that is trying to distract you from the fact that
you're an elevator, which is brilliant because you, yeah, you
get in there and there's no music, but there's this
little TV screen that gives your quick tidbits about the weather,
quick headlines, that sort of thing, and it can be
a lifesaver if you're stuck on there, not with a
complete stranger, but sort of a pseudo work stranger, like

(36:23):
something you really don't know that well, but you feel
obligated to speak to them. And then all you have
to do is look at at Captivate and then it'll
give you the weather and you'd be like, whoa, look
it's raining Saturday. How about that? Or look at that
Olympic headline. You know, install you have some sort of
nugget that you can probably discuss awkwardly for thirty seconds
or last. Yeah, because I mean that that again, is

(36:44):
the thing about the elevator is psychologically you're going to
want to have the again, the most vanilla conversation because
on a very primal level, what's happening is that you're
all stuffed into this elevator. You have no control, and
so what the human thing to do here is to
try to go to the spot where you feel non threatened.
And really that's what we're talking about here, is I mean,

(37:06):
in the day, we're all a bunch of animals anyway,
so we're all stuck in this elevator trying to make
sure that in that twenty seconds nothing bad is going
to happen. Therefore, the weather is fine. You can talk
about that if you must talk. And then we go
home in the evening and watch movies and TV shows
about bad things happening in elevators because we can't help it. Upset.
We have to find that release in our fiction where

(37:28):
somebody's having to have a baby in an elevator, somebody's
having to crawl on the roof of an elevator, or
your elevator is descending into the Chinese hell where people
are drowned alive. So you know, on that note, we
should probably take a break. Yes, we are going to
take a quick break I guess for like thirty seconds,
and then when we when we come back, we will
continue with elevators and to the planning that goes into them,

(37:51):
the uh and and and also the future of the elevator.
What what might that look like? All right, we're back. Uh.
The elevator doors have opened and we have arrived on
the floor for our second to second half of this
episode on elevators. That's right. And in order for us

(38:14):
to start talking more about the mathematical puzzle in earnest,
we have to talk a little bit more about how
our modern elevator system works. So one of the first
things to know is that when you get into an elevator,
it is automatically outfitted with loads sensors in the floor
and that manages the amount of weight that's in the car.
So if you've ever been in an overcrowded elevator and

(38:36):
you hear the door is danging, it's because the sensor
is saying, hey man, someone's got to get off. Yeah,
And that's why elevator sensors and also hotel personnel can
and will get visibly upset if people are jumping up
and down an elevator. Now, most elevator systems have a
computer that logs a bunch of things, a bunch of

(38:57):
I will say a request, Um, these things that they
lost is where a person wants to go, where each
floor is, and where the elevator car is in that
time and space. So if you press a button for
the floor you want to go to, the computer logs
the request, and then the computer notes where a car
is by either a magnetic sensor or a light sensor,
and it's feeding all that information to itself an algorithm.

(39:18):
More advanced programs will take passenger traffic patterns into account. Uh,
they know which floors have the highest demand and at
what time of the day, and they direct the elevator
cars accordingly. If you're lucky, if you're in the office
building right north Carrick Hall, a U t K did
not have advances. It did not. In a multiple car system,

(39:38):
the elevator will direct individual cars based on the location
of other cars. So all of that is going on
in the background as soon as you press a button.
So it all leads to this big mathematical puzzle. It's,
you know, how do you get from point A to
point B? How do you get the cargo, the human cargo,
from point A to point B with the least amount
of issue without just totally clogging up the whole system.

(40:03):
Without angering the people that are working there, but then
but also getting by with really maybe not the minimum,
but a minimum amount of elevators, because elevators take up
a lot of space. You need the shafts, you need
the the equipment rooms for them. And granted, uh, certain
technological advancements have cut down on the amount of equipment

(40:24):
needed to run it, but for the most part, you're
talking about a lot of space in a building, and
space is is valuable. Space is pricy. Remember that's why
we're building skyscrapers to begin with, because we want to
maximize the amount of office that we can fit on
a single piece of land. And if we end up
filling up most of that with elevators, that kind of
defeats the purpose. And it also kind of depends on

(40:46):
the function of that building. That's something that a lot
of engineers and mathematicians have to take into account. So
if you look at something like the Bronx Family Court system,
the building that that's housed in, and you look and
back in two thousand and seven, and you'll see that
that whole court system was completely messed up. It was
an absolute disarray because the elevators at its courthouse kept

(41:08):
breaking down and they couldn't use the stairs. It's not
and it wasn't like in our situation where the stairs
are only for fire exits. So it's it's just not
they're not accessible. They shut off the stairs because they
were a safety risk. They were just like an escape
from New York hell hole if you try to take
the stairs down to the Bronx. Yeah, so if you

(41:29):
had to go to the court, uh the courthouse in
the Bronx in two thousand and seven, you were screwed
because this led to our long waits, which led to
miss court dates, which led to needless arrest warrants, and
of course just the general messing up of people's lives. Now,
this is something that mathematicians and engineers really want to

(41:49):
try to avoid if they can. So they start to
look at various probabilities. Right, They've got um probability tables
that they rely on when they start to try to
figure out this puzzle of elevator systems. So, for instance,
if there are ten people in an elevator that serves
ten floors, it will likely make six point five stops.

(42:10):
You've got ten people, thirty floors, then you've got nine
point five stops. This is somewhere they can start, just
the odds of traffic. Now, there are two basic elevator metrics.
One is handling capacity, so that's carrying a certain percentage
of the building's population in five minutes, and by the way,
is ideal. So if you have I don't know, five

(42:32):
thousand people in a building, then percent of those five
thousand people should be serviced by your elevator system. The
other metric is the interval or the frequency of service.
So the average round trip time of one elevator divided
by the number of elevators. Okay, so now think of
all the other factors like door open and closed time,

(42:56):
loading and unloading time. You guys out there who are
looking at your smartphones or your blackberries when you should
be disembarking. You know who the last second you were
supposed to get off, So then you make a dark
everything else, that's right, you're increasing the unlearning time. Or
you know the situation where the thing is packed and
and who needs to get off the elevator. The little

(43:16):
old lady in the back of the car, you know,
so everyone has to sort of disembark and they're a
little they're a little wigged out because they're having to
do this, and oh what if they get stranded on
the on the elevator, because that's that's kind of a
mild fear. If you get off on the wrong floor,
you're gonna have to take the elevator again to maybe
to the bottom, depending on the system, and it's going

(43:37):
to be a whole headache. And you also have acceleration
rate and deceleration rate, so when the elevator is stopping,
and of course what we talked about before, inter floor traffic,
which is the thing that's sort of the wrench that
that you throw in that just kind of messes everything up.
And then to say nothing of phantom button pushers, that

(43:57):
is always the worst. When it opens and the nobody
there where did they go? I guess in reality there
might have been another elevator coming up and someone got
off on that floor and then they just hitched a
ride on that one since it was there. But then
my elevator arrives and it opens, and you're just like,
I guess it's the little girl from the Shining again
or the phantom farter the phantom is that an that

(44:19):
is a thing. I think the phantom farter push the
phantom floor m because that is another unfortunate reality of
of elevators. Two people in an elevator, nobody is allowed
to pass gas because it will be known who did it.
But three or more people just feel like they have
just an open license to just let it rip. And

(44:40):
it's just an enclosed environment. So well, and there's some
people who do it on purpose, people like I know
someone in my family, and I'm not going to mention
I told you I have a very scatological family who
they do this on purpose. Um, it's good to know. Anyway,
that is not fortunately a factor that mathematicians have to
figure out the actual parting capacity. But I did want

(45:04):
to mention again. The otis elevator mathematician Theresa Christie because
she developed algorithms using a computer simulation program and that
replays elevator decision making, so she gets to see it
in real time. And in that Wall Street Journal article
called the Ups and Downs of Making Elevators Go, she says,
I feel like I get paid to play video games.

(45:25):
I watched the simulation and I see what happens, and
I try to improve the score I'm getting, which is
so cool. I love that that that's part of her process.
She's thinking about it that way, and she recently worked
on the Empire State Building and was able to decrease
the amount of time, but I think ten seconds um
the time that they're actually in the elevator. The history

(45:45):
you could, based on some of the material we're looking at,
you could basically write a book just about the history
of elevators in the Empire State Building, because you have
you haven't, they've been around for so long. You have
some really catastrophic things happening from in the fens which
when the uh the aircraft crashed into the Empire State
Building and it and the impact severed the cables in one,

(46:09):
perhaps two of the elevators, and at this time you
still had elevator operators. So they plummeted with those elevator
operators on board, and I believe no, no, I believe
one operator was on board and one was not. And
the one woman aboard the elevator ended up living, as
I recall, because the cables were coiling up at the
bottom of the elevator shaft as a plummeted, because they

(46:29):
had to fall quite quite a distance, and by the
time that it hit the bottom and had a sort
of cushion going, so she was really she was badly injured,
but she did survive, and she was crouched in the
corner right so that when the impact came at the
bottom of the elevator too and kind of crumpled the middle,
she wasn't affected by that part. Um So of course
we should say that elevators are really really safe. I mean,

(46:51):
the statistics on how safe they are we will make
you feel much better. OTIS will typically show you statistics
that argue that they are safer that safer than esk lators,
because you know, they are more elevators than escalators. The
percentage of accidents is apparently higher with escalators. Um Likewise,
most of the individuals who are injured or killed aboard

(47:11):
elevators are people who are working on them, so they're
in a heightened state of danger because they're on top
of them, or they're repairing broken elevators, etcetera. Now, again,
this is something that someone like Teresa Christie has to
keep in mind when she's developing algorithms UM and when
she programs an elevator system. She also uses different weights

(47:32):
for the average person by region. So for instance, the
average American is twenty two pounds heavier than the average
Chinese um, and she has to account for the way
that people arrange themselves in an elevator, which turns out
is across cultures. It turns out that people will arrange
themselves into various geometric patterns each time a new passenger

(47:53):
gets on an elevator. So it's pretty it seems very instinctive.
So if you have two strangers on an elevator, they
will gravitate to the back corners. A third person will
stand by the door, creating Isoceles triangle until fourth person
comes in, and then they'll spread out through all four corners,
and then so on and so forth as people board. Yeah,

(48:14):
I believe that the article we're looking at they had
they used a dice as an example. The position of
the dots on any given side of a dice more
or less illustrates how people a position themselves on a
crowded or less crowded elevator. And it's, you know, similar
to a lot of the rules that govern the bank
of urinals. In a men's room, Where are where where

(48:37):
is a man going to stand? If there's if there's
no one at the urinals, Where will the second person
to arrive stand, where will the third, etcetera. Because no
one wants to be too close to the you know,
awkwardly close to the other individual who's taking a week.
Ye always wondered about that. For you guys, that's gonna
be very bizarre when just like if you're in there
by yourself, as someone just cruises up right next to you. Yeah,

(48:59):
if it's a long bank, like if it's a bank
of like a rest stop bank of like six urinals,
it's a little weird of somebody stands right next to you.
Now Here at work, we just have two urinals, So
it's you know, you're gonna stand next to somebody and
hopefully they won't talk to you. I was gonna say,
is there a chit chat? Um? Depends on the individual.
Some people seem like they get a little nervous and
they have to start talking and it's weird. But most

(49:21):
people seem to be governed by the no talking while
you're inating. I think that should be like the same
set of rules for the elevator, right, don't stand too
close and and and don't chit chat? Really all right? Um?
Teresa Christie, the she is one of the premier engineers
for for otis and mathematicians. She has created about fourteen patents,

(49:44):
and one of the patents I really loved called the
surfboard feature. Yes, and I want the codes. This is
something I wish that I was a great hacker, because
I would I would hack in just to get the
codes to elevators, because this feature allows you to essentially
turn any elevator into an express elevator. Because the situation
here is that, know, Waii, you have individuals who are

(50:06):
taking the elevator, but they have a surfboard with them,
So if they're on board with a surfboard, there's not
room for anyone else really to get on board but them.
They so they really need a direct line from from
their floor to the ground floor. And you know, this
has a lot in common with there are express elevators
out there, for instance, really tall buildings. We we mentioned

(50:28):
the limits of elevators earlier. They can only you can
only build an elevator shaft so high, and then the
physics get involved and they prohibit anything else. So you'll
have what you'll have is you'll have a landing platform
halfway up the skyscraper and you take an express elevator
to that and then you wait on an elevator to
serve elevators to service the higher floors. So the idea

(50:48):
of an express elevator isn't new, but what this is
doing is creating a custom express elevator for privileged UM,
good guest for surfers. Yeah, and you know what, this
is one little odd tidbit that I wanted to throw
out there, uh, that we did not talk about. And
it's a type of elevator system called the destination dispatch,

(51:09):
in which you key your floor number into a pad
in the lobby and the computer then tracks where the
cars are and assigned you an elevator bank number, so
at least are the ones you go in. Then there
are no buttons, no buttons whatsoever. So the illusion is
just shattered. You have no control. You're in an elevator
that you cannot manipulate in any way. I believe Palm

(51:29):
Garden was the one who who compared those elevators to
um like an elevator in a Bond villain's mansion or something.
You know, you're on board, You're like, who's in charge?
This is going to open up? You know, on the
into the like the into a pit of sharks or something.
I don't know. I'm totally out of control. And and
again it comes back to the idea that our technology,
the technology narrative of the elevators, is giving us power

(51:55):
and then sort and then steadily taking it away. It's
it's interesting to behold how it deve tells with whatever
else is going on in the world of technology. UM.
I wanted to point out that that jumping just before impact,
this is something that you hear about sometimes, like, oh,
if an elevator crashes, you can jump just before impact
and you'll be fine. That's a myth. That's a myth.

(52:15):
I want to close it out with that, because there's
never any reason to jump on an never right as
you say, that will mess up the weight sensors. And
there's two problems with that scenario. You can't jump fast
enough to counteract the speed of falling, that's the first problem,
and you wouldn't really know when to jump, right. Yeah, exactly.
I believe James Fortune when asked about this in the
Palm Garden's article, he just said, well, dead is dad.

(52:39):
He's he's kind of a grim individual. He've been in
the elevator uses a long time, had a very very
straightforward outlook on He's been in so many elevators he
have been thinking about being entombed for a while. I suppose.
So the future of elevators, UM, this is a course
of fascet We we have to end up getting here,
and we end up getting here. In most of our podcast,
what does this mean for the future? How will this
change in the future, And a number of these technologs

(53:01):
we've talked about. I mean that is the future, the
idea that we're going to see more and more elevators
where we have less and less control. It's all in
the computers. There are no buttons. Maybe they have some buttons,
but it's just about giving us a false sense of power. Um. Also,
smaller engines, better cables, sort of a technological increases in
small areas that improve and sort of whittle down and

(53:24):
and perfect the existing product. But as far as rapid changes,
as far as like really game changing changes, it's less
certain in that area because instantly, when you think of
high tech, crazy fantastic elevators, you probably think of two things.
You probably think of the elevators and the starships and

(53:45):
the and star Trek which show which can move just
about anywhere inside the ship horizontal vertically. Um likewise, I
think you see those in the recent Total Recall movie.
Their elevator boxes that move up and down and sideways,
and of course the wont evator that can go sideways
in diagonal ways and just can and can fly and
it's glass and it's the most marvelous thing ever now there.

(54:08):
Otis did have a design uh and UH they were
working on in the late nineties, and it was called
the Odyssey and this and they had a prototype for
this as well, and this is essentially an elevator that
can travel horizontally in vertically. So instead of instead of
having to take that express elevator up and then and
then get off and then board some more elevators, you

(54:30):
would have an elevator that could climb halfway up the building,
then move horizontally into another elevator shaft and then climb
that one. So it was a really I mean everyone
there was really excited about it, and then it was
gonna be huge, But in Asian financial crisis hit, uh
there was a rising cost of electricity and it basically

(54:51):
the idea was scrapped or at least put on the
backshelf to maybe be picked up later on. But his
Palm Garden points out in his article one of the
things is that the elevator, essentially in most people's mind,
is already perfect. I mean, it's it's not perfect there,
you know. We we want things this, we want the
thirty seconds or less, and the faster it gets obviously
the better. But for the most part, nobody is demanding

(55:12):
these crazy changes. Well yeah, necessity being the mother of inventions.
So until buildings really start to get more I guess
uh horizontal and vertically oriented, we probably won't see elevators
change that much now I would. I do want to add, though,
that there are pressurized elevators now in UH and at
least one of the high rises in um in Dubai,

(55:33):
I believe. So you are seeing that technological change take place,
and that's kind of futuristic, the idea that the elevator
is pressurized like a spaceship. But but for the most part,
don't expect the walcovator to be available in your area
just yet. That's right now. UM. If you are a
gear head and you wanna have a bit of a
deeper dive into more elevator specifics, including hydraulic systems versus

(55:56):
a roped systems. Check out How Elevators Work by Tom Harris.
That's on how Stuffworks dot com. It's a great article
that will take you through every different aspect mechanically of elevators.
And I have a little quote to take us out.
All right, and if the elevator tries to bring you down,
go crazy, punch a higher floor, ding ding ding ding,

(56:23):
Prince Rogers Nelson. Oh, I don't know that song song.
And then if the elevator tries to bring it down
crazy all right, I'm sure many listeners will know what
you're talking about. So that's good. I like the quote,
I like the idea. Yeah, so hey, we're gonna skip
our listener mail since we're went a bit long on

(56:44):
this one. And and goodness, we could have probably kept
going there because we ended up getting so many cool
facts about elevators. We didn't even get into some of
the crazy things people do on elevators. The the ice
cream story that I think you've shared before. Oh, yeah,
your father was on an elevator with an ice cream
com Yeah, it was in his office building and the
woman next him and said that that looks really good,
and he said it is, and she leaned over and

(57:07):
took a big bite out of it, and then the
doors opened as she got off. And then you said
that you yourself have at times danced on elevators, Dan,
I've done, I've I've done a lot of singing. Let's
we probably shouldn't talk about that. Well, we would love
to hear our listeners talk about that. So if if

(57:27):
you have some insight into elevators, elevator culture, elevator design,
we would love to hear about it. Particularly, what's the
craziest elevator you've ever been on? Be it super high
tech or crazy archaic? Um? What's your favorite scene with
an elevator from a movie or TV show? Um? Be
it something realistic or just completely unrealistic? And uh, and

(57:48):
what do you think about your interactions on an elevator?
Has someone ever taken a bite of your ice cream?
Do you dance or seen? How do you interact with
strangers or pseudo work strangers on when you're a board
and now vat we'd love to hear from everyone about this. Uh,
these about these questions so you can find us on Facebook.
You can find us on tumbler. We are Stuff to
Blow your Mind on both of those, and we're also

(58:08):
on Twitter where our handle is blow the Mind. And
if you are the ice Cream Bandit and you want
to confess, you can write us at below the Mind
at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com