• Nodody (unregistered) in reply to Bitch
    Bitch:
    Neither. We (the rest of the world) just dont like your crazy american floor labeling standards.

    I think it's naive to say that there IS such a thing as American floor labeling standards. I have seen the ground floor labeled as "1", "G", "L". I'm pretty sure I've seen things like "B1", "B2", "G1", "G2", "L1", "L2", etc.... I regard it as a little puzzle every time I get onto an elevator to try to guess where a particular button is going to take me. If you ask me, the only flaw of the "-1, 0, 1, etc." approach is being to logical for most people to understand.

    Then, of course, you have the buildings with multiple "ground" floors, because they are built on slopes and have "ground level" entrances to multiple levels. That's nice and confusing when you arrive for the first time and don't know the other entrances exist, only that you walked in on floor "2".....

  • (cs) in reply to cklam
    cklam:
    Fishy:
    So what is wrong with the first one?

    If it was a 50 storey building should the user be presented 50 unique buttons or a keypad of 10 digits to enter the floor number which can also then cope with floors below ground level?

    One button per permitted destination floor. Everything else is insane - if one button on a numeric keypad fails then 5 out fifty floors can not be accessed.

    Just get out the next floor and use the stairs. But hope it's not button 2 that fails when you have to go to floor 25.

  • (cs) in reply to cklam
    cklam:
    Because your 3-floor-building has only two floors. Ground floor doesn't count.

    Do you walk on bare dirt on the ground level? If not, there's a floor there.

  • v.dog (unregistered)

    TRWFF is that they simply didn't replace the buttons 0 and - with G and B

  • sf (unregistered)

    I don't know what's more pathetic, that we have 5 pages (so far) filled with people arguing about floor numbering, or that I paged through all 5.

  • (cs) in reply to cconroy
    cconroy:
    Someone You Know:
    I once helped out at a wedding reception where the groom, a programmer, had assigned numbers to all (eleven) tables. He didn't assign the head table a number, thinking of it as Table #0. The people setting up the venue looked at the list, saw that the highest number was 10, and only brought 10 tables.

    Zero-based indexing: complicating hackers' weddings since 2006 (at least).

    TRWTF is that he bought that excuse. Surely the head table is a different size/shape than the rest of the guest tables?

    To be honest, I don't remember for sure. I don't believe it was in this case. Since he reads or used to read this site (he introduced me to it, in fact) he may come around and tell you himself.

  • (cs) in reply to Ilya Ehrenburg
    Ilya Ehrenburg:
    cklam:
    Fishy:
    So what is wrong with the first one?

    If it was a 50 storey building should the user be presented 50 unique buttons or a keypad of 10 digits to enter the floor number which can also then cope with floors below ground level?

    One button per permitted destination floor. Everything else is insane - if one button on a numeric keypad fails then 5 out fifty floors can not be accessed.

    Just get out the next floor and use the stairs. But hope it's not button 2 that fails when you have to go to floor 25.
    Shit, I didn't think that through. But you are right. That makes the usage of numeric keypad grossly negligent. Imagine there is a medical emergency on floor 25 or somebody with a pram wants to go to 25 ... I would go to 30 and walk down 5 flights of stairs.

  • (cs) in reply to sf
    sf:
    I don't know what's more pathetic, that we have 5 pages (so far) filled with people arguing about floor numbering, or that I paged through all 5.

    I posted 7 times so far ... this stuff really pushes my buttons.

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Wow, I can't believe people are getting that worked up over whether the ground floor should be 0 or 1. Where I worked the floors are numbered

    3 2 1 0 01 02 03

    And the ground floor is usually 02 or 0 depending upon where abouts on site you are. It does at least mean that all the floor 0's are at the same height. Well, except where they aren't and you can go from walking on floor 0 to floor 1 without taking the stairs/elevator.

    By comparison anything else seems sane.

  • (cs) in reply to SmartAlex
    SmartAlex:
    *whoosh*

    Thank you for missing the humor. Saves more for everyone else. Thanks also for correcting the nick. 'preciate it.

    Didn't miss it, just didn't find it funny. And you're welcome on "the nick".

  • ZIP+4 (unregistered) in reply to Code Slave
    Code Slave:
    When anonymizing dead tree mail: 1) BLACK out (not blur) critical info 2) Remember to do the Zip code too.

    Arroyo Lindo Ave

    The 4900 block of Arroyo Lindo Avenue, as a matter of fact, on the even side of the street. Kinda looks like 4902 to me.

  • csm (unregistered) in reply to cklam
    cklam:
    Smash King:
    Wizard Stan:
    Actually, it's mostly just Europe (and Quebec... weirdos) that use the "1st floor is the floor above ground" system. North America (except Quebec. Seriously, WTF guys?), Russia and Asia use the "ground floor is first floor" system. I think Australia also uses British terms. Hong Kong appears to be split 50/50. That just leaves South America and Africa as the deciding votes. I wasn't able to find any information on how they number their floors.
    In South America we use the smart system too. Above the ground floor there's the first floor. I believe Africa must be the same.

    Hey America what's up with the 1-based floor numbering? Do you base your numbering system on roman numerals? Not the smartest system today eh?

    Even Africa is smarter than the USA. They do not even use medieval measuring systems there - they are smart enough to use metric systems.

    Sure, let's use the method at which we number floors in multi-story buildings as criteria for which country is "smarter". I don't think I need to cite examples here, and not to start a flamewar, but your comment is ridiculous.

  • csm (unregistered) in reply to cklam
    cklam:
    Wizard Stan:
    Smash King:
    In South America we use the smart system too. Above the ground floor there's the first floor. I believe Africa must be the same.

    Hey America what's up with the 1-based floor numbering? Do you base your numbering system on roman numerals? Not the smartest system today eh?

    It's actually quite intuitive. Building X has 3 floors. We count them: 1 floor, 2 floor, 3 floors! AH AH AH! With the floor on the ground, the one we point to and count "1", that's the first floor. The one above that, we point to and say "2"; that's the second floor. We then point one higher, and say "3", the third floor. I'm sure someone can equally justify the "ground zero" system: it's just two ways of thinking.

    Because your 3-floor-building has only two floors. Ground floor doesn't count.

    Let's examine that again. "Your 3-floor-building has only two floors." and "Ground floor" doesn't count".... does the word "floor" have 2 different definitions or something?

  • iToad (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that anyone would get into an elevator with controls consisting of a keypad and a Xeroxed page of instructions stuffed behind the keypad enclosure. If I encountered something like this in any elevator, I would seriously consider taking the stairs.

  • csm (unregistered) in reply to cklam
    cklam:
    Ilya Ehrenburg:
    cklam:
    Fishy:
    So what is wrong with the first one?

    If it was a 50 storey building should the user be presented 50 unique buttons or a keypad of 10 digits to enter the floor number which can also then cope with floors below ground level?

    One button per permitted destination floor. Everything else is insane - if one button on a numeric keypad fails then 5 out fifty floors can not be accessed.

    Just get out the next floor and use the stairs. But hope it's not button 2 that fails when you have to go to floor 25.
    Shit, I didn't think that through. But you are right. That makes the usage of numeric keypad grossly negligent. Imagine there is a medical emergency on floor 25 or somebody with a pram wants to go to 25 ... I would go to 30 and walk down 5 flights of stairs.

    If a building has double-digit floors then it would certainly have a) more than 1 elevator, and b) probably a separate freight and/or emergency elevator as well. You'd think the whole emergency thing would have been examined before people started implementing numeric keypads for elevators (which has obviously already happened).

  • Pedant (unregistered)

    Think the wtf is the lack of the '#'. Incidentally, I've always thought that lifts should have the pads on the outside. It would allow them to optimise the floors that they stop at.

  • internet (unregistered) in reply to nixar

    So what happens if we go to -2?

    nixar:
    [img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3161/2985884793_7620c2be88_o.png[img]
    You fucked up posting a screenshot in which someone fucked up posting an article about people who fucked up. Awesome.

  • DrGuz (unregistered) in reply to cklam
    sf:
    I don't know what's more pathetic, that we have 5 pages (so far) filled with people arguing about floor numbering, or that I paged through all 5.
    I also want to hear more about the allegedly forged items, Thesaurus and Vault.
    cklam:
    I posted 7 times so far ... this stuff really pushes my buttons.
    You can't get a rise out of me that way, sorry.
  • Herohtar (unregistered)

    Method to chang comment

    • Keyboard: 104 key
    • Open the comment in the internets, take out old comment and put in to new one
  • Pentium100 (unregistered)

    In Lithuania floors are numbered from 1. And "pirmas aukštas", literally "first floor" means what the British call the ground floor.

  • 40k3T (unregistered) in reply to Wizard Stan
    Wizard Stan:
    Smash King:
    In South America we use the smart system too. Above the ground floor there's the first floor. I believe Africa must be the same.

    Hey America what's up with the 1-based floor numbering? Do you base your numbering system on roman numerals? Not the smartest system today eh?

    It's actually quite intuitive. Building X has 3 floors. We count them: 1 floor, 2 floor, 3 floors! AH AH AH! With the floor on the ground, the one we point to and count "1", that's the first floor. The one above that, we point to and say "2"; that's the second floor. We then point one higher, and say "3", the third floor. I'm sure someone can equally justify the "ground zero" system: it's just two ways of thinking. But please stop referring to it as the American system. The point I'm trying to make is that significantly more countries than just the US use it, and it's quite insulting to be casually lumped in with them.

    OTIS was a FORTRAN programmer. The rest of the world waited for C.

  • (cs) in reply to cklam
    cklam:
    Fishy:
    So what is wrong with the first one?

    If it was a 50 storey building should the user be presented 50 unique buttons or a keypad of 10 digits to enter the floor number which can also then cope with floors below ground level?

    One button per permitted destination floor. Everything else is insane - if one button on a numeric keypad fails then 5 out fifty floors can not be accessed.

    That depends on the button that failed. If it was "1" through "5", there'd be an additional 10 floors that also fell out of the index.

  • Anonymous Cowherd (unregistered)

    @DrGuz: "I also want to hear more about the allegedly forged items, Thesaurus and Vault."

    I thought the Thesaurus.com one must have been 'shopped, so I checked it out. But yes, it reproduced for me, too. Clicking on the suggested link takes you to the right page; it doesn't send you in an infinite loop. (But now it seems to be fixed... maybe there's an issue with cookies if you try it twice, or maybe the Reference.com people read DailyWTF too. I don't know.)

    captcha: genitus

  • The Fake WTF (unregistered) in reply to Infinite Quality
    Infinite Quality:
    Was I imagining things? Or did I actually peer into the void there for a moment before it returned to the chaos and oblivion from whence it arose?

    Actually, you were viewing story -1. It's sorta like the minus levels in Mario Bros.

  • (cs)

    Floor -1: Actually in Europe, -1 is a quite common denomination for the basement. If there are several lower parking decks, that would be -2, -3 etc. I have seen those controls in many newer (and also public) buildings. You have to tell the elevator where to go and INSIDE the cabin, there will be NO controls and you're on your own. Good luck.

    Alumni: Oh well, just ask them to send you a new diploma. You just lost your old one....

  • Tama (unregistered) in reply to e
    e:
    well, seeing as floors are discrete integers, I don't think an irrational number, such as pi, would be very useful...

    You obviously haven't seen "Being John Malkovich".

  • Mark V Shaney (unregistered)
  • AC (unregistered)

    Go ahead and try to read this comment, dumbass!

  • Vincenzo (unregistered) in reply to Wizard Stan
    Wizard Stan:
    That just leaves South America and Africa as the deciding votes. I wasn't able to find any information on how they number their floors.

    You left out New Zealand where the ground floor is often represented by a... "G" followed by 1,2, etc. Basements are B1, B2 etc.

  • (cs) in reply to pyro789x
    pyro789x:
    I'm very sad. I sifted through four pages of whining and bullshit about the elevator part trying to find more information on that sourceforge one, to be left high and dry.
    Amen!
  • kam (unregistered) in reply to Smash King

    It makes the doors stay open longer. These keypads are outside the array of elevators

  • Herby (unregistered) in reply to Richard
    Richard:
    US First Floor = UK Ground Floor US Second Floor = UK First Floor
    Look, it is simple: US: Fortran UK: C
  • Joacim (unregistered) in reply to K&T

    That Wikipedia article is wrong. In Sweden, which is in Scandinavia, the ground floor is not regarded as the first floor. There are however some exceptions at some international hotels where the ground floor is counted as the first floor and I guess that is why this article assumes that this is the custom in Scandinavia.

    But I still don't get the WTF with the picture, there is obviously a minus button on the panel so pressing -1 is obviously possible. It is also perfectly logical that when standing on the ground floor you should press 1 to get up 1 level, and 2 for the second level and so on. Going down would then be -1.

  • (cs)

    Misdelivered mail is a WTF now?

  • tetha (unregistered)

    All this confusion about should tell us that our elevators are not usable enough. If a certain person enters the elevator and wants to go to floor 4, how should we know if he is from the US, the UK or even if he is a japanese suicidal.

    Thus, I propose that the elevator first asks for the country you are from, and then handles requests properly. If you are from japan and want to go to floor 4, the elevator is going to stab you with a photo of a wooden table with a knife on it, folded several times to make it more stable. If you are from a land that knows about Floor 13 and the bad luck it brings, the elevator is going to drop you into a random floor and say "Oops, I went the wrong way!".

    Furthermore, if the locale you enter is unknown, it must drop you into a random floor pretending to know your floor-numbering traditions far better than you do.

    Of course, we also need to add easter eggs for Paula, going "brilliant!" and TopCod3r, replacing the elevator music with rambling generated by Markov Chains based on comments on TDWTF.

    Did I miss anything to build the most enterprisey, unusable and feature-loaded elevator ever?

  • rast (unregistered)

    Thank goodness TopCod3r was banned! Otherwise he might have derailed this utterly fascinating five-page thread about what number the first floor of a building is.

  • ha (unregistered)

    I assume no one ever been in Moscow State University. The ground floor has number 1 in main building and number 2 in living hall part of it. You can walk between them without using any staircases so no one knows what's the number of floor in between. Moreover, the building has floors -1 (with swimming pool) and -2 (strictly for staff only) but do not have zero floor at all. Luckily we do not have elevators on these floors.

  • Mabuse (unregistered)

    Have seen that before, wait...

    http://shrinkster.com/12pc

  • Médinoc (unregistered)

    Rather that say if there is a WTF or something, I think I'll just sum up the numbering schemes:

          US         #US  #JP        UK          #UK      #FR            FR
   Fourth floor   4    5F   Third floor      3        3        Troisième étage
    Third floor   3    3F  Second floor      2        2        Deuxième étage
   Second floor   2    2F   First floor      1        1        Premier étage
    First floor   1    1F  Ground floor      0 or G   0 or RC  Rez-de-chaussée
 First basement  B1   ?1    First basement  ?1       -1        Premier sous-sol
Second basement  B2   ?2   Second basement  ?2       -2        Deuxième sous-sol
 Third basement  B3   ?3    Third basement  ?3       -3        Troisième sous-sol

    (I don't know how UK and JP number their basements, so I put '?' instead)

    I don't think any of these systems is really WTF-y...

  • (cs) in reply to mauve
    mauve:
    TRWTF is the use of a character-driven UI in this day and age. Lifts should be controlled with a scrollbar.
    This reminds me of the early days of Windows in our office: One of the users phoned up to complain that his screen didn't have a "horizontal lift shaft", so he couldn't scroll across...
  • (cs) in reply to brian
    brian:
    I see...so if 20 people are waiting for elevators and they press in their floor numbers and 3 elevators show up, how do they know which elevator are they supposed to get into? does the elevator announce which floors it's going to - like a conductor? deaf people would love that system. perhaps there is an lcd panel (or braille screen) on the outside of each door to indicate which floors each elevator is going to.
    In my last office (building of 17 floors), there were 8 lifts, with a system whereby you went to a screen outside the lift, and pressed the button for the floor you wanted. The screen would then tell you which lift to get into (A-H). It was a complete nightmare - you could wait ages to get into 'your' lift, then find it full, so have to start all over again. Or find yourself coming down from the 10th floor, stopping at every floor, doors open, no-one gets in or out, doors close... Thank god we moved from there. And no, I don't know what blind people were supposed to do.
  • (cs) in reply to MrsPost
    MrsPost:
    I've been very, very good about keeping what I would consider to be humorous error messages out of my code but I'm so tempted at times.

    Is it so wrong to include the logged in user's name in the error message to make it that much more personal, warm and fuzzy?

    "You can't do that JONESM. Do it right."

    Um, maybe not.

    Not like that, but you're on the right track. You need to costomise it for different names. For your example It should detect "Jones" and play the Indiana Jones theme music.

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    I know this comment will be 5 or 6 pages deep and no one will read it, but I would like to point out that trwtf is how those elevators work. You press the floor you want to get out at, then it tells you which elevator to get in (usually A,B,C...). So there are no buttons in the elevator at all.

    Which is why it has 0 instead of G for ground. If you press G and it says G in return you might be confused, but if you press 0 and it says G you know to go to lift G.

  • b.h. (unregistered)

    This reminds me of my own elevator:

    [image]

    It has buttons from -3 to +4, and somehow the logic seems to be "0 is the first story with apartments"...

    So: -3 and -2 are garage stories, -1 is ground level 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 are apartment levels

  • ClaudeSuck.de (unregistered) in reply to amischiefr
    amischiefr:
    Bitch:
    Where's the wtf for the first one?

    Captcha: nulla (i think you're right)

    Are you retarded or trolling? -1 for the basement and you don't see the wtf? I know I know, lots of European places use 0 for ground floor instead of 1, its not our fault you guys are mildly retarded.

    European houses are zero-based.

  • Médinoc (unregistered)

    Are you saying that using 0 instead of -1 for the basement is a common practice? What if a building had several basements?

  • (cs) in reply to csm

    Yes - apparently. The ground "floor" isn't a floor. In the case discussed above the building has two floors. Period.

  • (cs) in reply to DrGuz
    DrGuz:
    cklam:
    I posted 7 times so far ... this stuff really pushes my buttons.
    You can't get a rise out of me that way, sorry.

    Not even a seven-floor high-rise ?

    Silliness rampages.

  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to mathew
    mathew:
    It's perfectly simple and logical.

    To get to the Nth floor, you climb N flights of stairs.

    The American system, on the other hand, to get to the Nth floor you climb (N-1) flights of stairs.

    In my office building, in Canada, the floors are labelled L, 2, 3, 4, ... , 12, 14, ..., 17.

    Funny enough, to get to say, the 4th floor, I have to climb 4 flights of stairs (I normally take the stairs). 12th floor? 12 flights of stairs. 14th floor, though, has 13 flights of stairs for reasons previously discussed...

    So your pattern fails.

    (The lobby is 2 storeys high, so going from L to 2 requires going up one flight of stairs, then another flight.

  • (cs) in reply to amischiefr
    amischiefr:
    Bitch:
    Where's the wtf for the first one?

    Captcha: nulla (i think you're right)

    Are you retarded or trolling? -1 for the basement and you don't see the wtf? I know I know, lots of European places use 0 for ground floor instead of 1, its not our fault you guys are mildly retarded.
    Ground Floor = 0th Floor. Most sane building numbering schemes follow that and just call the Ground Floor "G", "L", "PB" or something like that.

    Of course, some go the extra mile and just put an 0 on ground floor, and negative numbers for sub-levels. However, I hadn't seen a "dial-up" floor selector in my life... and this one's got a huge WTF: Where's the "delete" or "cancel" button? "Oh noes! I pressed another 0! I'm going to the 100th floor! Stop!!!"

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