My Elevator

Hey. I had to write a"scenerio" last week for one of my classes. Essentially the assignment was meant to help us explore imaginary users for devices we plan to re-engineer in terms of sound interaction. I wrote my "scenerio" with a certain lack of seriousness because a) I'm a bit (?) of a wanker and b) because I may be incapable of taking anything seriously.

Anyways, I think you might find at least one of my jokes funny if you actually enjoy reading my blog.

After the jump.

Mark checks his mail. Pizza flyer. He never gets flyers from the place where he actually orders his pizza. Probably because they aren’t an international pizza conglomerate, like mom used to run.

He presses the flyer through the trash lid and glimpses dozens more inside.

At the elevators, he presses the up button. He looks at the floor indicator above each elevator and sees the left displays a “1” and the right a “7”. Moving in front of the left elevator, expecting it to open in reaction to his button press, he looks the fool. The left elevator doors remains closed as the number above the right floor indicator begins to decrease.

It does that sometimes.

The right floor indicator reaches “1” and the door opens. The left door never even pretends to open. Which is rude.

Mark enters the right elevator. Of the pair, it has the second set of doors that open to the loading/sticky garbage area. Sometime people throw out couches in this area, which is rude. This elevator, unlike the left, also beeps.

The doors close after Mark presses the button marked “11”. The elevator hums as it begins its ascent. Not to use sound clichés (are all onomatopoeia clichés?), but that’s what the elevator does; it hums as it moves.

But the humming is nothing. Mark accepts the humming. Indeed to not expect humming might be a little presumptuous. Anyways, as the elevator reaches the second floor the speaker beeps. And not a subtle beep, or a pleasant beep, the little speaker produces a harsh and sharp beep, just to let you know, you know, that you’ve passed the second floor. And the elevator offers this notification every floor.

I don’t know why the elevator thinks Mark, or anyone else for that matter, needs to know that s/he has passed the second floor, or each floor. Really, anyone only needs to know when they’ve reached their particular floor. Beeping every floor is like a tour guide that only honks the horn as s/he drives passed every site of importance.

The irritating quality of this ticker is only one of the myriad beautiful sounds this elevator can provide. Also for your listening pleasure:

• A rapid (approx once every 2/3 of a second) beepdicator to inform you that the elevator door cannot close. This usually occurs because you are holding the door back to prevent it from crushing a newborn child, or because you are holding the “open door” button while you wait for your significant other to grab her zune in the apartment and god forbid she go anywhere without the ability to listen to the new Drake album.
• A (again) harsh ringing tone that sounds when you hit the help button. Which you do, often, because it’s located right above the “close door” button, and is actually where the “close door” button is located in the other elevator.

As mark rides the noise machine up through the series of floors, he listens as the elevator gleefully sounds its beep at each floor. Again, Mark concentrates on the rhythm, struggling to determine whether the rhythm is indeed arhythmical as he believes. It could simply be the maddening force of the oppressive beeps that has distorted his sense of reality/sense of rhythm so that he merely perceives the series of beeps as irregular, but he swears (pinky) that the beeps are not perfectly rhythmic. He’s certain something’s off. Well, at least certain that the beep on floor seven is a micromoment shorter than the rest.

The elevator reaches the eleventh floor, the top floor of the building, the floor which maximizes both the time Mark needs to spend in an elevator to reach his apartment, and, crucially, the number of (possibly) arhythmical beeps he must suffer.

He exits the elevator and hopes to get lefty next time.