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Elevator rant
Monday, 13 February 2023 12:29I've been triggered again LOL.
I don't want to sound all stereotypical or discriminatory, but there are difference in certain things.
Elevator etiquette.
I think, we can all agree, regardless of your culture or custom or whatever, one thing we can agree with because, physical reality and constraints, the most basic of all basic of elevator etiquette is: Let the people come out first before going in. This is for the sake of everybody involved. You let the people out first, then you have more space to go in. You don't let the people come out first, then, not many other people, including yourself, can go in. Simple? Yes. Does it happen within the Chinese people? No.
I can sort of forgive the people who don't know how to operate an elevator, and it actually amuses me when they think that "pressing both up and down buttons would make the elevator come faster"... well yes, it might, but then if your intention is to go down and the elevator responded to your call for going up, the elevator is going up. And then they get annoyed that the elevator is going up, when they wanted to go down.
There are some people who seem to imagine that the elevator is like a UFO-catcher/crane machine. They press up to "call the elevator to come up" or press down to "call the elevator to come down". Lovely people.
I was in the staff corridor and there's 3 elevators there. Two were already going down, and the third is a security staff-operated that can go up or down, controlled by the security staff. So someone missed the 2 elevators going down. There were people waiting for the elevators to go up (would have to wait for the 2 going down to go all the way down, then come up again). This someone that missed, hijacked the manual elevator and said she's going down. Of course, everyone else, including me, got disgruntled about that. Anyway. I have to option of going to the front of house and use the guest elevator (I'm not uniformed staff) so I go out and do that.
Then, I meet a guest that's just standing in the elevator hall. She presses the down button. I press the up button. An elevator door opens, I see it's going up (there's like, an arrow that lights up and says up), so I go in. The guest follows me in. I tell the guest this elevator is going up. We are on a floor called 1F. I pressed the 3F button. She, like half dreaming or high, looks at the lighted 3F, and says, "oh, are we on 3F?" I did not have the patience to explain to her we are at 1F and this elevator is going in the direction of up. And she just dreamily left.
Geez.
I know a lot of that has to do with education, and the majority of mainland Chinese visitors probably come from the rural areas and so do not know how an elevator works. But there are many mainland Chinese people who have come to Macau and have gotten worker or resident cards and been here a while and should have learnt that somehow, but it seems that not.
In Hong Kong, I've seen some newfangled elevators in skyscrapers that you actually have to key in which floor you want to go to, so then the panel tells you which elevator bank to go to (so they can congregate the people going to the high/low floors or going up/down). Yes it was pretty new and I got confused for a moment, but still, it was pretty straightforward as well. You learn as you go.
To be fair, I have to say that I was actually surprised when I was in Portugal.
In Macau, when waiting for the bus at the bus stop, unless there's stanchion poles or dividers set up, there is no queue. Everyone just waits at the bus stop and when the bus arrives everyone just piles in, you get into the bus faster if you're agile. This is because you can get on multiple busses depending on your destination, so people just hop on to whichever bus that arrives first, so normally people don't queue (or that's what I think). Nowadays people are kinder to the elderly and let the elderly go up first, but when all the elderly are in, then it's game on. However, sometimes, these pushing and fighting are done by the actual elderly, so, whatever. Since I'm foreign-looking, a lot of Chinese people consider me a "gwei" (ghost, a term to say foreigners in Cantonese. You may have heard of "gweilou" ghost man... it's something like "Laowai" old foreigner in Mandarin) so, they have this mentality that "ghosts are not human, human decency does not apply to them" and they just consider me invisible or not there and just cut me through. *shrugs* I've read about similar experiences in Korea.
Digressing, so anyway!
I had always thought that this kind of no-queueing was a Chinese influence in Macau. But when I went to Portugal in 2018, I found out, that no. It's probably a Portugal thing as well. I was always under the impression that "It's Europe, all people queue in Europe." When I was in Prague, I was going on a bus to go to some beaten off the track place (Terezin, I think) and people were queueing. We queued in the line as well, but then the people saw that we had tickets, and told us to go up front. Apparently, it's priority boarding for those with tickets. But still, the civilized queueing impressed me. So imagine my confusion when I was in Portugal queueing behind a line but then when the bus came it was a savage world of fighting to get in LOL. Apparently the "line" I queued in wasn't really a queueing line.
I don't want to sound all stereotypical or discriminatory, but there are difference in certain things.
Elevator etiquette.
I think, we can all agree, regardless of your culture or custom or whatever, one thing we can agree with because, physical reality and constraints, the most basic of all basic of elevator etiquette is: Let the people come out first before going in. This is for the sake of everybody involved. You let the people out first, then you have more space to go in. You don't let the people come out first, then, not many other people, including yourself, can go in. Simple? Yes. Does it happen within the Chinese people? No.
I can sort of forgive the people who don't know how to operate an elevator, and it actually amuses me when they think that "pressing both up and down buttons would make the elevator come faster"... well yes, it might, but then if your intention is to go down and the elevator responded to your call for going up, the elevator is going up. And then they get annoyed that the elevator is going up, when they wanted to go down.
There are some people who seem to imagine that the elevator is like a UFO-catcher/crane machine. They press up to "call the elevator to come up" or press down to "call the elevator to come down". Lovely people.
I was in the staff corridor and there's 3 elevators there. Two were already going down, and the third is a security staff-operated that can go up or down, controlled by the security staff. So someone missed the 2 elevators going down. There were people waiting for the elevators to go up (would have to wait for the 2 going down to go all the way down, then come up again). This someone that missed, hijacked the manual elevator and said she's going down. Of course, everyone else, including me, got disgruntled about that. Anyway. I have to option of going to the front of house and use the guest elevator (I'm not uniformed staff) so I go out and do that.
Then, I meet a guest that's just standing in the elevator hall. She presses the down button. I press the up button. An elevator door opens, I see it's going up (there's like, an arrow that lights up and says up), so I go in. The guest follows me in. I tell the guest this elevator is going up. We are on a floor called 1F. I pressed the 3F button. She, like half dreaming or high, looks at the lighted 3F, and says, "oh, are we on 3F?" I did not have the patience to explain to her we are at 1F and this elevator is going in the direction of up. And she just dreamily left.
Geez.
I know a lot of that has to do with education, and the majority of mainland Chinese visitors probably come from the rural areas and so do not know how an elevator works. But there are many mainland Chinese people who have come to Macau and have gotten worker or resident cards and been here a while and should have learnt that somehow, but it seems that not.
In Hong Kong, I've seen some newfangled elevators in skyscrapers that you actually have to key in which floor you want to go to, so then the panel tells you which elevator bank to go to (so they can congregate the people going to the high/low floors or going up/down). Yes it was pretty new and I got confused for a moment, but still, it was pretty straightforward as well. You learn as you go.
To be fair, I have to say that I was actually surprised when I was in Portugal.
In Macau, when waiting for the bus at the bus stop, unless there's stanchion poles or dividers set up, there is no queue. Everyone just waits at the bus stop and when the bus arrives everyone just piles in, you get into the bus faster if you're agile. This is because you can get on multiple busses depending on your destination, so people just hop on to whichever bus that arrives first, so normally people don't queue (or that's what I think). Nowadays people are kinder to the elderly and let the elderly go up first, but when all the elderly are in, then it's game on. However, sometimes, these pushing and fighting are done by the actual elderly, so, whatever. Since I'm foreign-looking, a lot of Chinese people consider me a "gwei" (ghost, a term to say foreigners in Cantonese. You may have heard of "gweilou" ghost man... it's something like "Laowai" old foreigner in Mandarin) so, they have this mentality that "ghosts are not human, human decency does not apply to them" and they just consider me invisible or not there and just cut me through. *shrugs* I've read about similar experiences in Korea.
Digressing, so anyway!
I had always thought that this kind of no-queueing was a Chinese influence in Macau. But when I went to Portugal in 2018, I found out, that no. It's probably a Portugal thing as well. I was always under the impression that "It's Europe, all people queue in Europe." When I was in Prague, I was going on a bus to go to some beaten off the track place (Terezin, I think) and people were queueing. We queued in the line as well, but then the people saw that we had tickets, and told us to go up front. Apparently, it's priority boarding for those with tickets. But still, the civilized queueing impressed me. So imagine my confusion when I was in Portugal queueing behind a line but then when the bus came it was a savage world of fighting to get in LOL. Apparently the "line" I queued in wasn't really a queueing line.
