Friday, January 27, 2006

Elevator Hack

I saw an article today about a new system to help route elevator traffic. The concept is that you visit a kiosk in the elevator lobby, and based on what floor you're going to, it will tell you which car to wait in line for. Kind of like packet routing for people.

That reminded me of an elevator hack that I learned of quite some time ago. I haven't performed scientific tests to guarantee that it works, but it seems to:

To avoid stopping at multiple floors for people to get onto your elevator car, hold down the Door Close button at the same time that you select which floor you want to go to. On some of the more popular/newer elevators, this will have the same effect as using the Fireman Mode, and will take you right to that floor, regardless of whether there are people waiting on floors in between to ride in the same direction that you are heading.

Like I said, it might not work for all elevators, and I bet that property owners have the ability to disable this feature. But, after learning about it, I've been quite successful in using this hack (be that merely coincidence or not).

Give it a try the next time you're going up!