KZBlog

It is fascinating to watch the choices people make and how they frame those choices.

So there is a very small elevator in our building (there are also larger elevators, mind). It can hold maybe 3 people–there’s an alarm that buzzes when the weight limit is surpassed which is surprisingly frequently. My building has seven floors and a fair amount of activity. Now me, given a choice between being in a small and crowded elevator or not being in a small and crowded elevator, I go with being able to breathe (and not to be breathing the funk of cheap cigarettes and last night’s vodka). I feel this is a logical choice that most of my fellow human beings would make.

However, sometimes the elevator stops at a floor, when we are going up and people who want to go down get on, independent of how far up the elevator will go and how far down they want to go–so today two women got on on the third floor, only to ride all the way up to the seventh floor and then all the way down to the first floor, where they wanted to go in the first place.

To me this was illogical. Who prefers being crowded to not being crowded? I suspect now that they don’t register “crowded/not crowded”; it isn’t a category. Crowded happens, one might say. They think “doing something/waiting” perhaps and feel that being on the elevator is at least one step toward their goal, and better than waiting. Or something like this.

It may just be me but these sorts of things fascinate me every day.

I should note that people are very impatient and will hit any button presented to them multiple times in the belief that the elevator will therefore come faster–I think this is a practice not limited to Kazakhstan but one that is more common here. In short, if they want to go down they will hit both the “up” and the “down” buttons. Thus it is common for the elevator to stop when it is going in both directions.