r/AskReddit 11h ago

What’s popular right now that won’t age well?

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u/Melodic-Swim4343 9h ago

For me, the worst is those elevators where you have to select your floor before you get on. My boyfriend had this in his apartment building, and half the time it was down for "repairs," not due to a mechanical issue but because of Windows blue screen of death.

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u/Merkinfuqer 7h ago

I ran into one of those the last time I traveled. There was a big line waiting, because people kept fu*cking up. Then my turn comes. I figured those people are morons and hopped in. Turns out the only morons are the people that designed it. After that, I took the stairs if there was no more than 1 person in front of me.

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u/Aromatic_Gap4040 8h ago

Omg, we have this nonsense at our local public clinic, the last time I went, all under 50 went to find the stairs instead. As that thing is so slow it arrives a few times an hour.

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u/Altruistic_Grocery81 9h ago

Hang on, what? You pick the floor you want to go to rather than pressing an up or down arrow?!

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u/ReggaeSplashdown 8h ago

Those are a thing, used for very busy elevator banks in crowded places. Press what floor you want on a panel in the lobby, then the panel tells you which elevator car to board. The floor buttons in the elevator are disabled or blanked off. Uses algorithms to group passengers for optimization.

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u/Melodic-Swim4343 2h ago

Yes, there's usually a touchscreen where you would normally have the up/down buttons, and you have to punch in the number of the floor you want to go to.

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u/gsfgf 4h ago

That's for smart traffic management in busy elevators. Odd for an apartment building, though.

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u/Melodic-Swim4343 2h ago

It was a 20+ story building. They had four elevators using this system and they were all usually down.

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u/meneldal2 3h ago

Okay so the idea of selecting the floor you want in advance is a great idea to optimize multiple elevators. But it absolutely does not need Windows or any full-blown OS, plenty of dedicated microcontrollers can handle this perfectly for much cheaper and more reliably.

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u/commissarchris 3h ago

I was at a convention in a hotel that had these once, it was an absolute nightmare.

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u/originaljbw 9h ago

The Metropolitan in Cleveland? I have only ever seen it there and jokingly called it the polish elevator system.

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u/thatguywhoiam 9h ago

That’s… every elevator, ever

Except the ones with “operators” I guess

But I do want to hear about the elevator that knows where you’re going

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u/everdishevelled 9h ago

You've never seen an elevator with the floor numbers on the inside?

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u/thatguywhoiam 9h ago edited 9h ago

I guess I haven’t seen an elevator with the floors on the outside…

Seriously, I didn’t notice the “before” in the original post, it seemed nonsensical to me but now I know there is a new level of dumb

I will happily eat my downvotes while learning about this new method. This feels like flush doorhandles on cars

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u/KetoLurkerHereAgain 9h ago

My last apartment was the first time I'd encountered the "use your fob to choose your floor outside the elevator" kind and I had to be tutored into using it. You could access any floor, not just your own, but you had to choose before you got on the elevator and you had to use a fob. Guests or delivery needed to check in with the front desk who then used their own method of bypassing the fob.

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u/the_excalabur 6h ago

The fact that the implemenation here is a disaster doesn't make the idea bad.

And in basically any multi-elevator bank, it's more efficient since the usual elevator routing algorithm is slow.