Round and Round
My work day got off to a perfect start when I pulled into the parking garage. A quickly-printed sign was taped to the passkey reader. It read something like this:
Please do not drive the wrong way down the garage ramp. The ramp is for driving up and for parking. People have complained and there have been several near accidents.
This particular garage’s floors are laid out in the form of a bisected square. Looking at it from above, the left, top, and bottom sides of the square are flat. The right side is the down ramp, and the middle side (!) is the up ramp.The traffic flow for going up is as follows:
- drive up the middle
- take a sharp left
- drive along the left side
- take another sharp left
- repeat until you reach your floor
At the end of the day, here’s what you do instead:
- drive along one side of the square
- drive along another side of the square
- drive along another side of the square
- finally drive down the “down” side of the square
- repeat until dizziness and impatience make you crash into something
If you followed all that, you may have an idea why someone felt it necessary to write the note. See, at the end of the day, leaving the top floor, tired and hungry, the last thing you want to do is drive in circles, only going down one-fourth of the time. So you cheat.
You go down the down ramp, make a sharp left, go down the up ramp, make another sharp left, and go down the next down ramp. Et voila: you’ve just dropped three floors in less time than it would take to go down one floor the proper way. It’s late, the garage is nearly empty, and no one is coming up anyway.The urban geniuses that designed the garage ignored one crucial thing: people are in a hurry at the end of the day. They’re out of patience. They want to get home and see their families and eat. Yet the proper procedure forces you to take the long way down when you least want to.
It would have been so easy to lay out the flow the other way, so that going up was longer than going down. You get more opportunies to find a parking space in the morning, and you get out quicker in the evening.
I talked to a coworker on his way out. He planned to ignore the memo and take the short way down. So did I.
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POSTED IN: principles, work life
