The Elevator Shuffle

This post, about that weird dance you do on the elevator, was first published to my personal website on July 20, 2000 as part of a short-lived series called “The Monkey Journals.”

The monkeys work in a very tall building downtown. So tall is the building that we have to use elevators—we lovingly refer to them as the “vaters”—to get from ground-level to the above-clouds floor where we earn (hah!) our livings. Anyway, we occasioned for the first time today actually to notice an interesting phenomenon that has undoubtedly been occurring since the days of Otis: The Elevator Shuffle. It’s strange yet familiar, odd yet common. One might even say axiomatic. The general behavior is that when you get on (or in, as some prefer to say) an elevator, the positions taken by the passengers follow a predictable pattern dictated by how many are present. Almost as if choreographed by Thomas Crown himself. And as people embark and disembark, the remaining passengers move to their designated positions either to accommodate the additional riders or fill in the space left over by a now-absent participant.

Riding alone? You’ll stand in the center of the elevator cabin.
You and one other person? Each of you hugs a side.
Three? Left and right slightly forward, center at rear.
Four? Each of the four corners.

We’re sure that there’s some kind of psychology to all this, but the monkeys don’t care about such things. We just like to look at others and laugh. So the next time you’re on an elevator, pay attention. You’ll see what we mean.