Riding the Elevator One Floor

Please, if you have two able legs, nothing to carry, and the stairs is right next to the elevator, please do not ride the elevator up one floor. It greatly annoys those who have multiple flights to go up.

Thank you


I originally wrote this post more than a year ago, as I was aggravated with all the people in my building that insisted on taking the elevator one floor. I wanted to scream at them to ask them if they realized how much they were inconveniencing everyone else, but I never did.

The funny thing about this, is that I would often think about ways that the elevator should really be optimized to shuttle traffic in my building. During the beginning of the day, it would wait on the bottom floor for people since most likely people would want to go up, the opposite would be true at the end of the day. All sorts of optimizations would pop up in my head.

And it actually came up in an interview I had the other day. The guy asked me how I would design an elevator algorithm, and I thought back to all those times I wanted to scream at those people that they were messing up my optimum strategy. Who knew it would pay off? I got a job offer from them.