Escalator – An escalator is a moving staircase – a conveyor transport device for carrying people between floors of a building.
We all know escalators. They appear in shopping areas all over the world, are common in lobbies of major buildings like hotels, airports, and movie theatres, and are overall pretty damn fantastic devices. They even double as stairs when they break down. They move pedestrian traffic faster than stairs, they are incredibly safe, and they can go in a lot of places where elevators are not practical.
The problem? Most of the world’s idiots don’t know how to use them. You see them everywhere. Two big-boned women standing side by side as it struggles and strains to carry them and their Diet Coke to the top. A group of teenagers who climb on board and use the travel time as an opportunity to bunch up, turn around and chat to each other. Because they desperately need to share latest news on who kissed who at Josh’s house party last weekend, oh my god did you hear what Becky did that slut how can she even show her face oh my god I knowww. ¹
Here’s how you use escalators. You walk up to them. Left right left right. March on up. Then you climb on board, being careful not to let your loose shoelaces catch inside the mechanism and feed you into the machine. ²
Then.
And this is very important.
You keep walking. You do not stop and stand and turn to others and chat. You keep walking. Move those feet. The escalator is moving. If you move too, you are moving much faster. The whole point of an escalator is to provide a quick way to get people up to a higher level without causing chokepoints on stairs and in elevators. The lazy bumpkins who step on to an escalator and just wait to be carried to the top are causing chokepoints that don’t need to be there. If you have some reason for not being able to walk, then you stand to one side, single file in your group, and allow the able-bodied to walk past you.
By far the worst offender for this is IKEA. Every IKEA I’ve ever seen has the same asinine design. You come in from the parking area. There’s a lift, a set of stairs, and an escalator to get to the main level. Then there’s one more single escalator to get from the main foyer to the showroom level. ³
When I go to IKEA, without fail I walk up the stairs (because there’s inexplicably a herd of actual bovines standing on the escalator waiting for it to carry them up to the top), then step on to the second escalator, where I am forced to stand still behind people who seem to have forgotten that escalators are functionally no different than stairs. When I reach the top, it is four hours later, IKEA has closed, and I am forced to camp out for the night in one of the “there’s no way a 7sqm apartment could actually look this good” apartment displays. Then I wake up in the morning, and stand behind more people on the escalator back down to my car.
All of the above applies to travelators in airports. The human conveyor belts, transporting us to the airplanes and overpriced concession shops, cramming us together while we all contract fatal diseases and die.
None of that matters, however, because an empty travelator is some of the most fun you can ever have while travelling for 36 hours. Try power walking on one sometime. It’s the closest you’ll ever come to being The Flash.
The Angry Australian
¹ – I actually nearly died writing this sentence. My brain began to liquefy, my fingers began to shrivel and fall off, one by one. I staved off death only by immediately performing the most adult task I could think of. Paid the gas bill instead of buying myself a videogame.
² – I maintain that everyone has had this fear. I still check my shoelaces before I step on an escalator.
³ – Where you then proceed to take an immediate left and go down to the market hall, where you buy fourteen tea towels, five sets of plates, three hundred glasses, spend a total of $3.50, and forget to buy the things you came for entirely. Don’t get me started on IKEA. What a great place. If nobody else is there.
The Angry Australian 