A blond girl in her twenties with the physique of a jogger slid into an elevator going up at the 3rd floor of the Campus Center.
“I just don’t think that young people, and we’re mostly young here, who can easily take the stairs a few floors should be taking the elevator. It clogs things up for people who actually need it,” she said.
The elevator doors opened on the 4th floor and the young woman got out.
“Good luck with your poll,” she said as the elevator doors shut behind her.
Hypocrisy blared in the results from a recent poll on elevator etiquette done by the Mass Media News Team.
This week the Mass Media asked 152 students two questions:
What do you dislike about the elevators at UMB?
What minimum number of floors are you willing to take the elevator?
Some students were adamant about only taking the elevator when they absolutely needed to, but most favored elevator use to cardio exertion.
About 2/3rds of the students polled were riding the elevator while they were asked the questions, and this had a noticeable impact on their responses. People polled on the elevator tended to dislike the wait the most, and almost never mentioned any complaints about smells.
Answers from people not riding the elevator when they were asked the questions were more varied. People getting off the elevator also tended to be much more optimistic about the number of floors they would be willing to climb stairs to get to.
The most common tirade prompted by Mass Media’s questions concerned the elevator’s speed.
“There are just not enough for the number of students here,” one older lady fumed. “They keep raising and raising enrollment, and this school’s elevators are just not designed to handle that volume.”
She took the elevator from the Fourth Floor to the Lower Level in the Campus Center, and shook the reporter’s hand for looking into what she called the elevator problem at UMB.
While some people were ambivalent about the elevator questions, most had a fervent opinion: elevators are unpleasant.
After all the investigation, one thing is clear: if more people took the stairs the elevators would be much more enjoyable for the people that need to use them.