Bananas in pyjamas

[venta]

So, people of the internet, tell me your thoughts on climbing stairs.

For our example, we're going to consider my office. I work on the second floor. It's a high-ceilinged building, so more stairs per floor than an average house, but it's still (on average) quicker to climb than it is to wait for the lift. It's actually a rather grand marble staircase that wraps round the lift shaft (three sides of a square, not a spiral) and it has bannisters on one side.

(66 steps - I just counted them)

Now, at one end of the spectrum we have, say, a wheelchair user who will always take the lift. At the other, maybe a fitness enthusiast who will always run up the stairs. In between we have people who do one or the other, or whose behaviour changes from day to day depending on a million factors.

I walk up the stairs every day because I think it's quicker. Because I'm too impatient to wait for the lift. Because I worry that (having a dicey knee) if I don't use the stairs I might one day find I can't any more. But primarily because I assume that stairs is the usual, default choice of someone who feels physically up to climbing them without impacting the rest of their day. For two storeys, you'd only bother with the lift if you couldn't do the stairs.

Empirically, this is not how my colleagues feel: most of them take the lift.

Now, I know my colleagues all consider themselves physically capable of tackling the stairs. I know this because my desk-neighbour recently had to write a hasty addition to our fire safety policy when we had a contractor who couldn't, in emergency, use the stairs.

I understand, though, that there's a big difference between "can in an emergency" and "choose to every day". I have no idea whether people have health issues that mean they prefer the lift, whether they just consider the lift the sensible option, or whether it's simply slightly closer to the entrance. Maybe they just don't want to arrive at the office out of breath.

And so, my representative sample of humanity, I'd like to know your thoughts. If you can use stairs, do you? If not, why not? Do you think the question should be "given that there is a lift, why don't I use it?"

Comments

[shermarama]

Generally stairs for me for anything up to three floors, and lifts for anything more, or if I'm feeling really knackered, or have just cycled in at high speed and need to demist a bit before arriving at a meeting, or if I'm carrying something heavy, with some further exceptions:
- I live on the third floor and there's no lift here, so I walk up and down those all the time
- I used to live on the seventeenth floor and would walk up or down the stairs now and then just because I could, really. They were neat and clean and perfectly usable, but hidden away in the core of the building with no natural light and an unlabelled separate entrance, and they had the feel of a secret space no-one else ever used. Also since there were only two lifts serving floors nine to thirty, when one of the lifts broke or was being blocked by movers it was sometimes still quicker.
- I used to work in a university department that was housed on the fourth to eighth floors of a building, and the department went through a phase of replacing the traditional open noticeboards with enormous locking perspex-fronted ones, because they liked to have lots of notices in the corridors but loose papers had been identified as a fire hazard. These were too big to fit in the lift, and were heavy enough to need three people to convincingly carry. So many of the other technicians learned to avoid me at around that time because of the risk I was going to ask them to walk to the eighth floor carrying one-third of a very large noticeboard.

I'm sure some people would ask why you don't just use the lift seeing as how it's there, but I bet a lot of them would be younger.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I wonder that you're right about the younger. The average age in my office is very low, maybe they all just haven't started writing about their knees/general health yet!

[shermarama]

Perhaps you could bring this topic up with them and see if you can induce any of them to start worrying about it? Or would that be evil?