Escalators.

Yesterday, we had a post featuring elevators.

I'm not hugely keen on elevators, quite frankly, and I won't take one if I can avoid it.  I used to basically figure if a building was only three stories, I was taking the stairs.  Laziness would allow me to take one up if the structure was higher than that, but I have rethought that after being in an uncontrolled elevator fall (of three stories), something that puts me in a very unique category.  

I don't recommend it.

I dislike escalators even more than elevators.

Elevators generally don't scare me, I just don't like waiting for them and I don't like being packed into them like sardines in a can.  Escalatores, on the other hand, cause me some degree of trepidation.  They always have.

When I was growing up there were three escalators in the entire State of Wyoming, and they were all in Casper.  The J. C. Penny's building downtown had one, the 1st Interstate Bank building had one, and the airport had one.  

None of those escalators are still around.  

We didn't have the occasion to use those much when I was a boy.  Occasionally I'd be with my mother when she'd go into the bank, and if she had to use the second floor, it meant taking the escalator.  She had no problem with it, but I stare at the steps coming up from the floor trying to time when to step, and it'd take me some time. The same is true for the rare occasions in which we wanted to go to the second story of Pennys, which wasn't often. Shoot, we didn't go to Penny's often at all.   And, suffice it to say, there was even less occasion to take the escalator at the airport, which lead to a second deck once used for boarding planes.

It no longer has that use.  Indeed, they hoest events, like wedding receptions there now.  You have to take the stairs, or an elevator.

As an adult, about the only place I encounter then now is at the Denver International Airport, where I don't always take them.  I no longer hesitate before getting on the escalator, but I still don't like them.

And apparently a lot of other people don't either, as there aren't as many of them here.

Escalators are on the news as Donald J. Trump walked up to an escalator at the UN building and it stopped working.  Apparently a videographer tripped a safety device, but the MAGA's are outraged and view that as sabotage.  He incorporated the incident humorlessly in his babble in front of the UN, where he also had to deliver his babble without a teleprompter due to some error on the Trump team as well

Mid Week At Work. Elevator Operators

Elevators were at one time fairly complicated to operate, and had to be precisely stopped by an operator at the designated floor in order to keep there being a gap between the elevator and the floor. But that hasn't been the case for a really long time, and already was not by the time these photographs were taken.

In movies, anyhow, elevator operators call out things on various floors, if the elevator is in a commercial retail building.  That trope is so common, there must have been some truth to it.

Indeed, a female operator (by at least the 1940s the role seems to have been filled by women and men) is the subject of a movie, that move being The Apartment, in which Miss Kubelik is the object of the illicit desire of a collection of men employed by an insurance company.  The film is not only a great one simply because the story is good, but for looking at occupations, it does a nice job of looking at corporate employee life of the late 50s and early 60s, and occupations of that era.

Are there elevator operators now?  I've never seen one anywhere.