22: Lifts of Singapore
Navigating the ups and downs of expat life.
Growing up in 1980s regional England, lifts were so rare that encountering one and being permitted to press the button was a moment of genuine excitement. Four decades later, my front door (pictured above) is a lift.
Better still, these days I don’t even need permission.
But once the excitement of button-pushing wears off, reliance on lifts in Singaporean daily life becomes increasingly irksome.
Irk number one is the unforgivable intrusion of when other people get in the lift. Thankfully this is rare at home, since each lift serves only ten units. There is one woman in the building who seems to invade my lift privacy with uncanny frequency but since she is also married to me I have learned to live with it.
Her. I have learned to live with her.1
Meanwhile in the office towers and multi-storey malls that accommodate a significant percentage of the population every day, a solo lift ride is a rare and coveted thing indeed.
Every day at work, I take the lift to the 26th floor of my office building, as pictured above. There are no fewer than six cars in this lobby yet there is frequent overcrowding, especially during the lunchtime rush hour when gangs of colleagues descend to the basement food stalls to makan2 together (see also Lunching like a local).
In such crowded scenarios, the unwritten rules of liftiquette demand that you keep your eyes glued to your smartphone screen, and therefore that all polite conversation can be avoided. For the inexplicably phoneless, there is the distraction of two small screens showing bite-size trailers for newly released films showing at the cinema on levels five and six.
As people enter and leave on various floors, I like to test the theory that people naturally stand in a lift according to the pattern of dots on the face of dice:
It’s definitely true for four, five and six (the latter either horizontally or vertically), but the occurrence rate for two and three is less conclusive. The full capacity of these cars is 23 people, which should apparently follow these layouts:
Some of these configurations would seem VERY odd in practice, although with everyone intent on their phones I’m not sure they’d notice. My research continues.
Exacerbating the irksomeness of these crowded cars is a recently installed system that requires you to press the button of the floor you want before entering. Presumably intended to increase efficiency, it results in quite the opposite.
As you can see from the notice, all lift passengers are required to press INDIVIDUALLY so that the electronic brain knows how many people want to go to each floor. Unfortunately, the brain manufacturers forgot that these lifts will be used by humans, and that humans don’t follow instructions - even the most compliant of humans, Homo singaporeanus.
I know from weary experience that lift-sharers in large groups never push the button the correct amount of times, whereas solo travellers often press multiple times out of frustration at the lamentably slow response time caused by a single lift being sent to multiple floors while the other cars sit there going nowhere. As more people join the lobby, they start pressing repeatedly too, with each new request assumed to be genuine by the software, resulting in ever-longer delays as the system starts thinking its lifts are full.
Pity also the poor souls who rush into the lift as the doors are closing only to discover that you can’t select a floor once inside the lift and they will have to wait until the first pre-ordained stop to disembark and re-order a lift to the correct floor, which also happens to be the most delicious example of schadenfreude you can ever experience.
As it happens, there is one cunning way of avoiding lifts: to move into a so-called walk-up, which I am doing at the end of this month (see also How to house-hunt in Singapore), and which means that soon, when leaving home each weekday, I shall have the unalloyed pleasure of traipsing down four flights of stairs in the tropical heat every day just to reach my front door.
Irksomeness aside, I think I’m going to miss pushing that button.
This joke has been approved by my wife, albeit with eyerolls.
Singlish for ‘to eat’ - see full etymology here.
The dice pattern is ALWAYS on my mind when I'm in the lift!
Came for the Spätburgunder, stayed for the Schadenfreude