Elevators

I work in a building with 20 floors, and unless I feel like walking up the 18 flights to my floor, I get to ride an elevator. To answer the inevitable, yes, I've walked up the stairs many times. Not a big deal. But dealing with elevators for many years, I've gotten to observe how people act around them, and it really is an odd thing how people act with elevators.

Start with the basics. To call an elevator, you walk up to the button and press the direction you want to go: up or down. If you're on the first floor, there is one choice. In fact, most people will push down from my floor because there is rarely any reason to go up to 20 (when I have done, I just take the stairs; it's quicker). Anyway, just like when children want to do something, there is this odd competition that goes on for who presses the elevator button. I don't even know if they realize they're doing it, but it happens.

I'll be walking up to the button, being the first one to approach it when someone else appears. Seeing that I am going for the button on the left side of the hall, they'll make a high speed beeline for the button on the right. We're on the first floor. Which direction am I going to push that doesn't work out with their plans? Maybe they are the type to call "First!" on YouTube videos. I don't know. I'm three inches to their three feet from the button, so I continue my prearrange trajectory and push the button. As soon as the light goes on, they put on the brakes and pull their hand back like it was a huge shock that I was doing exactly the same thing they were.

So we wait forever for an elevator even though it is 6:30am and there is almost no one in the building. That's another rule, though. Even though there are five elevators that express from floor 1 to 11 and go from 11 to 20, only 2 or 3 of them work at any given time. They appear to have a minimum wait time as well because you can almost never press the button and have the doors immediately open. No, you have to begin your awkward elevator journey nodding at the guy who's either still upset because you pushed the button first or can't figure out how his telekinetic ability worked to make the light come on before he touched it. After the minimum 30 to 60 second wait, the doors open, and you do a last minute check to ensure you commit no social taboos and get on before someone who should get on before you.

You see, while women's lib has been embraced by the world and the sexes are supposedly equal now, God forbid you commit the social crime of forgetting the rule of "ladies first" or at least persons of the female gender (in cases where you're clearly not dealing with a lady, if you follow me) first. If there is any rule left over from the old days of chivalry that women don't mind clinging to, it's "me first." Everything else can fall by the wayside, but you must let her go in first even if you're standing next to the door, and she's wandered to the other end of the waiting area (you know, because she wanted to push the button, and she's sulking).

But wait, before you go in the elevator, you notice there's already someone in there. There is a sort of elevator etiquette that not everyone knows about, and I hope you'll remember. Everyone in the elevator gets to come out first, and then new riders can get on. Hopefully, you can see the logic behind this. Some people don't. I've been pushed aside (literally) for someone to get on before I got off before, and I wondered what their hurry was since they aren't going anywhere before I get off. Maybe they were afraid I'd push their floor button before I got off.

So, you're finally in the elevator, but there's yet another problem. There is this odd mindset (probably related to the minimum elevator wait rule) that this elevator is the last elevator in the world and it's never coming back. If someone misses this elevator, it's the stairs for them. The only time you will see overweight chap with no arms on his office chair for a very good reason run full tilt is when the elevator door is open, and he thinks he'll miss it. God forbid you have to stand and wait for the next one because then you have that awkward moment when two people missed the last elevator in the world and have the fight over who gets to push the button to call the next one. In addition, the people in the elevator believe this as well because they'll hold that elevator door until the alarm goes off to allow someone to catch it.

This creates another awkward moment if you happen to be the small percentage that knows that you can just call another elevator when this one leaves because someone going into the lift sees you coming. They decide to hold the door for you, and you notice. What do you do now? You were walking along at a leisurely pace not caring for anything in the world except getting to that call button first, and suddenly, you're deprived of your button and now have someone holding the door for you. To show that you care about their time, you have no choice now but to take up a jog that honestly goes no faster than you were walking to begin with. You can't run because the security guy will look at you funny (because people look funny when they run).

Once inside the elevator, you waive and smile at the worried face running to the closing doors with a shrug because that open doors button is a farce and doesn't work anyway, and I'm sure not sticking my hand in the closing doors. Those sensors don't always work (I've seen Final Destination 2). Now, you're riding up with two people from different floors who are pissed off at you because you got to the up button first. You stand in awkward silence ensuring you don't break the rule of "Don't you dare talk to me. I don't know you and can defend myself." The three of you stand as far away from each other as possible in the small closet-sized space waiting patiently for someone to get out so the other two of us can have more space.

We reach 11 and the guy gets off. Oh, super awkward now. The doors close and she moves to the opposite side of the lift and tries to squeeze into the cracks into the wall since anyone who would deprive a defenseless woman of her button pressing right is creep material, and she's going all the way to 20. But now there's another problem.

You know, elevators are there to make life easier. I get it. But I only take them because opening my day with  432 steps from ground floor to 18 (Yes, I know how many steps there are. Why? Is that weird?) is not fun. So we stop at floor 14. Some guy who looks like an image of fitness walks onto the elevator and presses...15. Really? You interrupted our awkward elevator moment to come in and go up one floor. I could sleep walk up one floor. Rock Girl could walk up one floor without hurting hers-... wait, no she should take the elevator. Anyway, in a moment of mutual disdain, my fellow rider at I glare at this guy who stands three inches from the door trying to avoid the heat of our gazes behind him as he rides up one floor knowing he was wrong and regretting his button pushing obsessions. He all but runs out, and I have three floors left to look anywhere but at my fellow rider.

Before I know it, I'm at my floor and can't even see the woman flip me the bird as I stroll happily on solid floor again instead of that tiny closet that could plummet me to my death at any moment. In between happy dance steps, I ponder taking the stairs and avoiding all those awkward moments and button competitions, but then I remember the landing incident where I was going down, a woman was exiting the floor, and another woman was coming up, and we stood there staring, wondering who should go first. At least in an elevator, we could have just avoided eye contact.

Audiophile

So as you may well know, I'm all into music. It makes me happy. I speak the language. I can't get enough of it. A guy at work (who I noticed I had referred to as The Mixer at one point) called me a media mutt when it comes to what I listen to and watch because there are no limits with me. I will listen to and evaluate anything. New or old makes no difference. There is nothing before or after my time.

Right now, for example, I'm listening to Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold, the first part of Der Ring des Nibelungen, his 15-16 hour epic opera cycle. Yeah, it's in German. Anyway...

I have the Amazon Cloud Player and for the first time since the iPod, I am able to organize a large amount of music, but unlike the iPod's 80Gb limitation, the Cloud has a limit of 250,000 songs, regardless of size. This is staggering. They do this by having space available for upload along with linking songs with their own download library so that some of the dongs are your own while others are those they've matched to theirs. Anyway, my count after all the burning and uploading that was to be done over a 3 week period tranferring everything from iPods, hard drives, and CDs came out to a little over 32K tracks. I cannot say songs because not everything is a song or even music, but tracks accurately describes it.

I believe the oldest pieces date back to the 1600's while I have stuff from 2012 as well. Haven't grabbed any 2013 stuff, cause the year is too new to know what's worth getting. That may seem like a lot and even raise an eyebrow, but I've been buying CDs and downloading from a variety of (legitimate) services since high school. I would blow hundreds of dollars when I was in the military buying entire artist catalogs on a whim (I specifically recall doing this with Billy Joel, Oingo Boingo, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Stephen Sondheim to name a few). If someone said "listen to this," I'd have the CD before going to bed. I went through hundreds of CDs in my garage determining what I had on my iPod and what I hadn't. And I was not alone either. The Queen listens to different genres of music than I frequent, so she had her own catalog of CDs to review and upload.

Now, I'm going through music I've not listened to in years simply because I never had room on my iPod for it. It was stored on CD, so that was enough. Now, it's accessible. In addition, because of how the cloud player works, anyone (in my family) can get what they want from the library and place it on their iPods to listen to. Whenever and wherever without waiting for me to plug in and find it for them.

Rock Girl was excited anyway.

For me, it means I can delete some things off my iPod that I've kept on there for storage and free up some space for music to actually listen to. This thing is going to completely change my iPod's purpose. It's very cool.

Wisdom

You know, as I sit here at a job I never anticipated in my younger years, I ponder what people once told me. You see, I wanted to write music. Specifically (at the time), musicals. That was my goal. And I could do it. I was always asked, though, what my fall back plan was, and I always replied that I didn't need one because I would succeed. Here I sit almost twenty years later still not having succeeded, and I note that they asked me the wrong question. They always worded the question like "when you fail, then what?" You can't tell someone with determination that they'll fail. It's uncool. The angle should have been, "what do you want to do while you're working toward that goal?" or even "what will you do to make enough money to pay for that goal before they pay you?"

What I'm faced with in reaching this goal now is the monetary side of it. I can succeed if I have enough time and money to throw at it, but I honestly make enough to pay the bills. That's it. If I had planned my life out better, I would have gone for a psychiatry doctorate, worked as a psychiatrist during the day (hey, a head shrinker sounds like fun), and then by night, I would have had the excess scratch to pursue what I want to do. It would pay better than what I do now anyway.

We've passed this wisdom on. Rock Girl said when she was little that she wants to be an astronaut. We encouraged this, and now when she's about to hit high school, we're digging deeper to find out what she would do as an astronaut. After all, people go into space for a specific reason, so she would have to specialize in some field of science to be necessary on a space mission. She actually loves astrophysics. So we're taking the angle of while you're not in space, what job would you like to do that will make you happy and give you the skills to go into space, should the opportunity arise (since the space program is currently floating at the top of the toilet waiting for the guv'ment to pull the handle). She has embraced this willingly.

So it's sort of a matter of living my life vicariously through my children, but if she achieves her goals and lives an even better life than I did, then I believe I can say we've done well.