Logos of Crafts

Today I returned to Dortmund, being officially an employ of the University. As my flat is still totally empty and sleeping on a bench is not an option, I booked a room at a local hotel. The building is clearly quite old and the hotel is a nothing-special 3-star I-guess-ok-for-the-price place. In any case, the funniest thing happened today:

I’m returning from some shopping, get into the elevator, press the button from my floor, button light goes on, doors close, but nothing else happens. I’m waiting for a while, before I realize that for the first time in my life I am trapped in an elevator. Thankfully, it was just for a minute; the girl at the reception somehow opened the door from outside. Then we realized that the elevator’s control would not respond any more to pressing buttons — it had just died. I’m getting out and start climbing up the stairs, when I see the reception girl running them up, steps three by three, up to the last floor as I found out later on. At the time I guessed she was just checking that people are not waiting in vain, as it had probably broken and they would need to call a technician.

This evening, returning from dinner, I got in the elevator again (I just never learn…) and saw three button lights on — but the elevator was at the ground floor. I asked the guy at the reception about it. The answer was “oh yes, I must go to the 6th floor and restart it, will do”. As it turns out, switching equipment on and off to make it work, is not a privilege of IT as I used to think. I would expect that elevator controllers would have solved such problems ages ago, but clearly this is not the case. Except if the elevator is controlled by some PC-based software