Elevator observations

By Neil Armstrong

I’ll wager that most foreigners have never spent so much time in an elevator than they subsequently do after they come to live in Korea.

In my first week, and at a rough estimate, I doubled the number of occasions and tripled a life’s length of time spent going up and down while standing still. My only solid “lift”: recollections pre-Korea are hazy memories, from the late 1970’s, of a very large man sitting in the corner of a department store elevator forlornly listing, as we arrived at each floor, the goods to be found there; up until the day, that is, when his job was outsourced to a sign. It would now feel like a demeaning affront to share an elevator with a human recitation device.

The first electric elevator in Korea was installed in the new Chosun Hotel in 1914. How did its wealthy passengers feel once the door shut and, shorn of money protection, they found themselves temporarily in the hands of creepy science? Were the rich the first to feel a new kind of fright, their muted subconscious fears invading their thoughts in the silent elevator space? Is that what the elevator is, an enclosed space in which suppressed emotions torture you until release at the skin clinic or comic book room?

Or is there really nothing that profound going on in an elevator? Korea would be as good a place as any to take a closer look. For what it’s worth, I’ve noticed the following: The advertised "excess load” and the actual weight which causes the excess load alarm to sound bear no relationship. Four walls of mirrors in an elevator are a bad idea. Television, in an elevator, seems like exactly what it is: loud corporate and government propaganda. Poems in an elevator are a good idea.

Teenagers who get out on a high floor having pressed the button for every floor on the way down as you wait on the first floor should be imprisoned. The signboard of businesses is almost always out of date. More of the elderly can occupy a smaller space than the merely middle aged. The woman who did the floor voice recording would be the richest person in Korea had she secured a royalty deal. There is no noticeable difference in the catastrophe rates of those elevators which use "F” instead of the "death number,” 4. The "don’t lean on the wall” sign doesn’t work (in my case).

And one other thing; that the famous elevator experiment in which “fake” passengers kid the others by facing away from the door, in order to exhibit the pressures of social conformity, doesn’t apply in Korea. This is because most passengers have taken the same elevator many times before. They would be more likely to think of a person facing the wrong direction as a victim of faulty plastic surgery.

So, nothing profound. It’s just an elevator, and shouldn’t be made too much of. Some do, however. An open plan three story lift has been installed in the Louvre museum in which passengers stand on a pod, exposed to the busy floors around them. Were they riding the half kilometer long elevators of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest man made structure, it would be impressive. As it is, they look like the laziest tourists in Europe, and helplessly ridiculous whenever the thing breaks down.

The amount of time I have to spend in the elevator in Korea used to, as we say in England, do my effin nut in. Now I’ve relaxed a bit. I try to take the opposite view. I enjoy the experience as a communal moment of harmony and rare quiet; one in which we all stand in considerate spatial relation to each other, and stare at that "F.”

The writer is the author of “Korean Straight Lines.” He can be contacted at nbarmstrongbook@yahoo.co.uk.