Escalator Temporarily Stairs

"I like an escalator, because an escalator can never break. It can only become stairs. You'll never see an 'Escalator Out of Order' sign, only 'Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.'" -- Mitch Hedberg

Sometimes things work even when they don't. At least in the real world it's that way. In the programming world, it's like "Well any human could probably accept that this guy has no middle name, but I can't so I'm going to not let you add this record." Perhaps other patterns can be derived, or antipatterns exposed. -- NickBensema

How about, "Elevator temporarily bungee tower :-)"

"This elevator temporarily providing service as a spare closet. We apologize for the convenience."

The reverse of this effect is a closet that turns into an elevator, as seen in TheAndromedaStrain?. Or RealGenius?.

This Xerox is temporarily a Writing Desk.

This also describes a failure mode that merely degrades a service, rather than stopping it entirely. Contrast this with elevators. Other examples of items with such failure modes are:

Radio-operated car keys which can also be used in the physical lock.
Magnetic stripes on keycards (of any sort, such as library cards) which can also be used by typing their ID number.
ISBNs given as both barcodes and numerals, so that people wanting to read the number without a scanner can do so.

Notice also that an escalator is not consistently a superset of stairs. Unless the escalator stops at exactly the right position, the rises of the lowest and highest steps are building code (safety) violations. Extend this to other cases of degraded services.

Perhaps in some areas, and perhaps some places enforce the rule more than others. In Arizona, very seldom have I seen an escalator blocked off because it was broken. Perhaps because the escalator still looks like an escalator, and most people are used to slight variations in step height at the beginning and end. When do you stop walking when you get on the escalator? When do you start walking to get off, so as not to get "sucked under"?

Additionally, aren't there signs all over the place at the top and bottom of escalators that tell the users to watch their step? An escalator is an obvious departure from a fixed set of stairs, so the user should be on his toes when he goes to use the mechanism whether it is functional or not. If a user is too stupid to recognize that a broken escalator might not have parked the risers at the correct index he is most certainly a DarwinAwards candidate.

Personally, I keep walking for the entire length of the escalator, if it's not too crowded. -- DanielKnapp

That's right, inoperable escalators undoubtedly slip by the code constraints in place for real stairs, for whatever of a dozen reasons we could speculate about. In my view, a moving escalator is way more dangerous than any stationary set of stairs no matter how uneven the risers. But who am I to stand in the way of the kind of progress that can eliminate stair-climbing from our already too-sedentary population. In Grand Central Station, there is a huge escalator carrying people down to the subway platforms. I've seen congestion cause a saturation at the lower level, in which the escalator turns into a sort of mass torture device, throwing additional bodies down there and presumably grinding them so they can be packed tighter...I ALWAYS use the stairs alongside, having seen that.

No, my point above was not whether or not stationary escalators are "safe enough" to use. It was whether an escalator becomes "stairs" when it stops. Close, but not quite. -- WaldenMathews

But wouldn't a world without escalators be just a little less dramatic? What about those mile-long escalators that take you in and out of the cavernous Washington D.C. Metro? Even some of the long escalators leading out of Penn Station have a similar grandness, if the experience of just having been in Penn hasn't fried your nerves too much for you to notice. -- francis

More generally: WorseIsBetter

You'll never see an 'Escalator Out of Order' sign, only 'Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.'"

I see that sign all the time. They put it up while fixing the escalator.

: I've seen congestion cause a saturation at the lower level, in which the escalator turns into a sort of mass torture device, throwing additional bodies down there and presumably grinding them so they can be packed tighter...

This reminds me of the "iris" in the StarGate? series, which is used to squash the bignasty du jour (who has followed our heroes into the gate and hence is now helplessly streaking through hyperspace towards Earth) by covering said gate with a solid surface before said unfortunate bignasty's arrival. -- Todd Renzema [See also: WarpDrive]

http://www.msnbc.com/local/RMN/DRMN_2085490.asp?cp1=1 [BrokenLink 2006-02-21] describes an incident where an escalator malfunctioned due to too many people aboard, and the escalator essentially went into a sort of free fall. I'm sure most escalators are designed to stop when broken, but that's not the only possible failure scenario.

CategoryJoke _=_=_=_=_=_=_=

by aundiewear@hotmail.com

If you have an option to do less work such as going up stairs, people will choose it. Now think if they physically have the inability to incline and not even KNOW it. Who would want those very genes floating around in our species that may have the inability to go up stairs? So you progress the gene for not being able to incline as well as not be aware of it. <i>they won't be able to climb Dawin's ladder. </i> The additional "help" of escalators and elevators should be banned. It's practically a sin in my book to need the actual help other then yourself to progress upwards.. and that being mechanical help to say the least! Could you even BEGIN to imagine all the super stair climbing people there would be on this sweet earth if we could always just be convinced?!!

Escalators found their niche in shopping malls, since many women carried so many bags of stuff as to be overburdened. You see this lampooned all the time in movies and TV shows; it's a stereotype, but it's mostly true. Many need only sit in the benches at most malls for a few hours to confirm this stereotype is valid. Since then, however, their proliferation has created laziness the world over.