Can't Get There From HereThere are elevators in the building where I work. Most of the time, they are the dutiful abstraction that the modern elevator has become: walk into this little room, press a button, ignore the shifting pulls, and then exit where you want to be. This is sufficiently commonplace that even the expectation of arrival has fallen into the realm of the granted, even when the elevators get cranky, and the buzzers go off because people hold the doors open for too long.
Sometimes the elevators get crankier than other times.
Consider: three people get on an elevator on one, and press the buttons for three other floors. The doors close, and all goes too quiet. No motion is felt, but after too long a moment, the indicator displays two. Three has been pressed, and the display says three, but the elevator slides slowly by, upward. The buzzer begins to ring, and the buttons do nothing. It is becoming clear that the elevator is a malfunctioning box climbing ever higher in a shaft, and beneath it, nothing but increasing potential energy.
I walk over bridges on the commute, bridges that I would otherwise take with the car. In the car, a bridge is that abstract thing, a logical extension of the roadway. There are other things to worry about, in cars. On foot, bridges become feats of engineering and faith, strange structures that leap from here to there and keep us up off the valley.
The elevator eventually let us out at the top. I've been taking the stairs. This doesn't stop the stairs from being just another engineering problem.
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