Elevator Wisdom Part 2: Elevators From First Principles or The Fractal of Underestimation

Behold this Twitter exchange. If you read my previous post, you can spot the surety of someone who thinks he knows something, but kinda does not.

Manual elevators do not have a throttle and a brake in the same sense a car does. They have what's known as a deadman, a spring-loaded lever that can move the car up or down at two speeds and stop is when returned to the middle position. It's not like driving a car or even a bike.

Secondly it is indeed true that the skill could be learned in a few hours. You can start your training in the morning, and by the end of the day do it well enough to work through a shift. But by no means does it mean that you can master this esoteric skill in a day. Mastering this skill takes years, decades, in fact.

Here's a typical elevator operator. Watch how smoothly he operates the controls, how he does not need to adjust the floor level several times, how practiced he is. To learn to smoothly stop level with the floor 99% of the time takes a lot of practice, and even when missing the mark, correcting smoothly is a hard skill to learn. You can stop higher, you can stop lower, you can miss the floor entirely. There are two speeds, you can switch to a lower speed too soon, or you can jolt the car by stopping too abruptly. Muscle memory does not develop in a few hours.

Beyond that, there are esoteric skills that are best not attempted by amateurs. For instance, the faster way to stop the elevator is to open the inner accordion door. You can time this maneuver with exact lining up off the floor and the car, and very elegantly increase the overall speed of operation without sacrificing the smoothness of the ride. A rougher, but more impressive maneuver involves stopping by reversing the lever — it is the fastest way to stop, but it supposedly damages the cables, although I saw oldtimers perform that trick from time to time. But most mind boggling is the consistency with which someone with 40 years of experience can stop the car exactly level every single time while keeping up the conversation and keeping an eye on the annunciator.

A skill seems complicated to someone who's ignorant of it, it seems too simple to someone with cursory knowledge, and complicated again to someone who has a good deal of experience with it. It's like some kind of a bike shedding fractal, I swear.