Lift etiquette: What not to do in an elevator

Lift etiquette: are you the button monitor?

Lift etiquette has bothered people since the first commercial lift – or elevator, for our American friends – was put into operation by Elisha Graves Otis in a New York department store in 1857.

Since then, there have been countless commentaries published to explain to the unwary how to act in a lift.

Rules can be obvious: no farting, burping, violent sneezing or coughing fits. Basically, don't be anti-social and disgusting, especially if you are at work and the boss is in the same lift. (Unless you hate them and want to drop one silently and run).

Other rules are less obvious. These include:

Button Monitor

If you are by the buttons, you are ‘button monitor’. This is an unofficial rule. It becomes your responsibility to push the button for other people. Don’t let this responsibility go to your head. Do not ask for tips. Do not pretend you’re in the Science Museum and make noises for each floor number you press.

Coffee King

People do have to bring coffee into lifts if they’ve bought it outside of the office. Keep it close to you. Nobody wants your latte down their best suit.

Phone calls

Most lifts do not have cellphone reception but if yours does, please don’t regale your lift buddies with your previous night’s exploits. It doesn’t make you look cool. It makes you look like a Neolithic jerk.

Let people out first

This is something that should not need to be explained. Yet every time I step to the right to allow people to leave the lift when it arrives, colleagues stand right in front – and then act surprised when people try to get out of the lift. It’s simple manners and every day I see morons forgetting the simple fact: people get out of lifts, as well as into them.

Two-floor rule

If you only work on floors 1 and 2, and have no medical, baggage, or age-related reason for not walking, walk up the stairs instead of being a lazy nuisance. All you do is make your lift colleagues going to floors 4 and above resent you for stopping the lift and delaying them getting to their desks.

Conversations

If I am having a quiet conversation with someone and continue this in the lift, I expect to carry on this conversation in low, hushed tones, with that person. I do not expect people I do not know to join in. If you know me, fine, I’m in a shared space with you, but for the sake of a few seconds’ space-sharing, please do not butt into something to which you have not been invited. If we wanted your opinion, we’d ask for it.

This has happened twice today at work, in fact. People I’ve never seen before felt comfortable offering their thoughts and opinions quite freely. One didn't join the conversation but dropped a passive-aggressive 'aside' to me, before running out of the lift before I could respond. The other just blithely gave a running commentary on What'sApp to two people who were not interested. Lady, I don’t care to hear your commentary. 

With both these interruptions happening at work today, I felt it worth double-checking with colleagues and online-based etiquette gurus. William Hanson was kind enough to respond to my tweet:

Apparently, it IS rude when you don't know the person, at least in England, although as Mr Hanson says, it could vary from culture to culture.

So, when in the office lift, please stop butting into other people's conversations. I don’t interpose in other people’s conversations so don’t feel free to blunderbuss your way into mine.

However it is also worth mentioning it could be best and more polite to put all conversations on hold in the lift to avoid giving someone else the opportunity to barge in uninvited, and bear in mind the lift is a shared space.

Caveat

It goes without saying this all only applies if there is anyone else in the lift with you.

If you are alone, or with one other like-minded individual, and there is no camera in the lift, you are quite welcome to play ‘Lift Chicken’.

Lift Chicken: The Rules

Lift Chicken: Solo

If you are on your own, and the lift slows to stop at a floor other than the one you’ve chosen, the Game of Lift Chicken is officially on.

Strike a ludicrous, exaggerated pose right by the doors.

See how long you can wait in that position as the doors open.

If you bail out before the doors even slightly part, you’re a chicken.

Don’t get caught by the boss.

Lift Chicken: Two people

As before, but the winner is the last one to cave in to decorum before the doors open.

The other is the ‘chicken’.

Don't be chicken - play Lift Chicken to win!

Beating the business card blues

Recently, my employer was taken over by another firm, which necessitated the destruction of thousands of business cards.

I had only recently been given reprints of my previous ones - which meant I had 200 cards sitting unused on my desk. My colleagues, likewise, had more than 100, as did my husband (we work for the same company).

It does grieve me to see waste. Even though most people in my immediate vicinity dutifully put their unused old business cards into the recycling bin, I thought there had to be another way to put these to good use, rather than simply relying on a very energy-intensive industry to process them and probably turn them into new business cards. Or a shirt. Either way.

At the same time that I trundled home with five heavy plastic boxes filled with old business cards, my husband managed to buy me: 20 sheets of Mr Men stickers for £1, one 20m reel of orange ribbon and one 20m reel of turquoise ribbon for 50p each.

I had a long weekend planned - ie, one without additional freelance work, hosting Sunday lunches for family or friends, and without anything at all to do. So I ensconced myself in my teeny-tiny 'office' (aka craft room) and began to make batches of cards.

I experimented first of all with the Mr Men and Little Miss notelet series, on pale cream card and using scraps of orange card that someone had given me several years earlier.

Close-up of card front Image: SimoneySunday via Instagram

The work in progress. Image: SimoneySunday via Instagram

Having made about 40 of these cards, I batched them up into sets of six (with some left over) and started to sell these on my Original Shimmering Designs Facebook page as notelets - ideal gifts for people who live a long way away. Light, unusual, original and using recycled/repurposed materials.

It should be stated that I used liquid paper (Tippex for the Brits, Copydex for Americans) to blot out the details on the backs (fronts?) of the business cards before sticking them onto the card fronts. 

I then received in the post some gorgeous little doggy buttons in painted wood. I'd ordered these way before Christmas but they took a while to arrive. Again, using the backs of old business cards, and coloured card which had once been marketing material from my office and I found in the recycling bin (yeah, sorry, I went bin-raking like a tramp), I experimented a week or so later with the darling doggy cards. These are also for sale via my Facebook page. 

The work in progress Image: SimoneySunday via Instagram

I also used up some other wooden buttons that I had lying around, as well as some of the pages of an old book about British Woodlands. This book had been left outside someone's house, in the rain, without any covers. When I asked about it, the lady had left this, along with other cover-less books, for anyone to take to use for craft. I jumped at the chance!

Close-up of the doggy card. Image: SimoneySunday via Instagram

Two of the finished products. I think they are really cute (but then I would, I made them). People say I am a cat-lover but I hope this tribute to our Scottie Dog friends might make people realise I love ALL animals (except spiders but then they do not count as an animal as they are arachnids).

Two of the finished products. Image: Simoney Sunday via Instagram

Who knew that old business cards, leftover pieces of scrap marketing material and discarded books could make such beautiful things? Well, it beats buying cards for £4.50 from an 'artisan' shop when you can get them from £1.50 upwards from the Mermaid of Moorgate!