Jun 09 2011

Let’s Take the Stairs: Lifts with Attitude

From now on I’m taking the stairs.

Especially if I’m Scottish.

Too much technology can be dangerous.

The lifts in the Hitchhiker’s Guide offices are called Happy Vertical People Transporters. As designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, they are meant to be sentient (enough to argue with) and have “defocused temporal perception.” The latter concept is meant to enable the lifts to see far enough into the future to arrive at a floor before a potential passenger realizes they wanted a lift, and thus remove all the tedious chatting and friend-making as per old-fashioned lifts. The ability to see even a little way into the future is apparently so depressing that they ultimately take to sulking in basements.

People, not technology, are the problem with these lifts. French people, in particular.