> The last one happened today. Again, I was going down for lunch and some guy was in it when I got in on the third. He seemed ready to get out when I got in, but halted when he saw it was the third. A lot of people wanted lunch around then and the lift stopped at second and third before getting to ground. Each time the guy was ready to jump out as soon as the door opened. He was standing opposite the clearly visible LED floor indicator the entire time.

This is the only one I can imagine a reason for. (I mean a non-insulting reason.) Perhaps the guy didn't know which floor *number* he wanted, but would recognise it as the right floor when he saw it.

I never take lifts unless it's the sort of lift where it counts as entertainment. The rocketship one in the movie complex downtown counts in this category. (I wish I'd thought to take Sam and Leen and Dave there; wintermute liked it WAY too much.) This lift is a clear narrow tube with big pointy kitschy 1950s red rocketship ends on it, top and bottom, and round lights set into the floor which you stand on, á la old-style Star Trek transporter beams. It only goes up two or three levels but it is SO WORTH IT.

The entire building interior is sort of like a collision between the aforementioned 1950s space kitsch, dark creepy Giger sets from "Alien", and some sort of futuristic aircraft hangar. It's five or six storeys high, but the theatre entrances and other businesses in the complex open at various levels off the central courtyard, which is open all the way up. You can go up five or six storeys on zigzagging escalators which just stick right out into the middle of thin air, leading to walkways back and forth. Then add lots of blue neon, line the whole thing in bare concrete and stick ten-foot-wide slowly-revolving turbines into everything. Go on, tell me that would be a huge design mess. It is. But it works.

Brunnen-"at least, it does if you're me"G