Elevator pranks

[Radien]

Okay, I know I'm staff -- sorta -- but I had something to say about the elevators.

At one point I saw a girl sitting down on the floor in the elevator. She told me that her friends has played a prank on her and had pushed her into the elevator and pressed all the floor buttons. She also said they were waiting to photograph her when she got back to their room floor.

Later on, late at night, I got ready to board one of the elevators to find out that someone had waited for all three of them to come to the same floor and then pressed all of the floor buttons on each one of them. Every floor was lit up. It took about 5 extra minutes for me to reach the bottom floor, and there was no one else on the elevator.

I can't be sure that the second prank was made by con attendees, but let me get this perfectly clear: how many of you were at Kumori Con 2004? If you were there for the elevator fiasco last year, you should understand than elevator pranks are not funny. The extreme holdups caused by excessive elevator traffic at Kumori 2004 were one of the biggest problems of the convention. I also heard elevators broke, and I've seen an elevator actually break at Sakura Con.

Do NOT mess with the elevators. Holding them up leads to people wanting to overload them, and overloading the elevators may very well lead to one of them breaking. Not only does that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to fix (which doesn't do anything to ingratiate us with hotel staff), but it also endangers people's lives, even if only slightly. If you want to play pranks on your friends, go put toothpaste on their pillow or something. I don't care. Just stay away from the dang elevators. :?

[ObiJay]

Agreed. I just do not see what's so funny about making people trying to go up or downstairs stand there waiting forever, or worse the people in the elevator get stuck for about 20 minutes trying to get to the lobby. With our room on the 13th floor, it was a serious annoyance. I saw some kids with badges eyeing the buttons and each other, but then they took one look at me and the look on my face and decided otherwise. My fiancee says that it has a look of murderous intent.

It seems almost tradition for elevators at Sakuracon to break though, unfortunetly.

[guspasho]

Oh man, I was the butt of one incident and I just wanted to clock the guy. I was on an elevator alone going to the 14th floor from the ground level, and this Armenian guy (definitely not a con-goer, and there was an Armenian conference of some kind there, I understand) who thought he could oh-so-subtly push all the buttons while hiding the panel from me with his body. He got off at the next floor. I just had to get off the elevator and wait for another. That pissed me off so much, and I was already in a bad mood.

[kylite]

Not to be a total downpour in this BUT there is a button on the elevator called "cancel call".  pressing this will cancel button press's.  if this dosent work you can use the intercom to contact the lobby who can reset the panel quickly.  this does pose problems in and of itself BUT I found it helped imensly when I was on floor 14 and had to get to the lobby IN A HURRY.

[Neko_Chan]

Gah. I'm sorry to everyone who has to go through that crap. I find it annoying and sometimes I joke around with pressing all the buttons, but I wouldn't ever do it for real.
I am an idiot somtimes and I press the wrong button (We were floor 8, and I pressed the number 7 buttons on accident sometimes).

And I'd like to say thank you to the staffers and/or volunteers who sat on the floor of the elevator place and counted people as they got into the elevator. >_< I didn't know there was a limit... Thanks for informing everyone so that nothing bad happened. <3

[Chocoboholic]

I was only a victim of that once. (Thankfuly) and I used the elevators throughout the whole convention as my costume was too heavy to be pulling up stairs day after day.  :lol:
Maybe I'm just out of shape... anyway.

Perhaps (staff size permitting) next year more staff should be 'on guard' at the elevators. It makes it easier to make sure pranks like that don't happen. Also some people might be more hesitant to pull a prank if they know people are watching.

[sumomo_san]

:0 Me and my friends were playing in the elavators in a parking garage in Hillsboro racing them, but no one else was there...That would be rude to do that when people actually wanted to ride D: At Kumoricon the only elevator we rode was the one that only went up and down from the registration area to the place where kareoke was. We had nothing to do so we were just sitting in it talking and stuff... But if anyone called it we'd get out and let them ride, so I hope we didn't cause trouble for anyone ^^;

[Moraela]

One of my friends pushed all the buttons why my group wasn't looking.  I got so embarassed because she was being very immature, and also, there were people boarding.  I'm so sorry if this posed as an inconvenience to anyone at Kumoricon, I will try and refrain her next time -_-; (I doubt this incident was mentioned to Kumoricon staff, but even so ... -_-)

[Shadow]

This may be why the elevators got so crowded at one point during the con...>_>

My two friends that I was with and I got into an elevator and saw that the people in the second elevator had pushed all the floor buttons. So one of my friends got the bright idea to push every button on the elevator also. And people were getting on and everything...Most of the people were not from the con, but everyone kinda got annoyed. I felt bad..and I`m sorry if this caused an inconveniance for anyone. ^^; Although it was kinda fun to ride the elevator straight up to the 15th floor, and try to make it all the way back down again without getting stopped....

[valliegirl]

And one mooore thing!

The manager of the hotel (and our bestest friend in the world) informed us at the rant and rave that these elevators are no longer manufactured, they're about 30 years old and when something breaks the hotel's machinists have to MAKE a new part from scratch.

Seriously.

The Romanian Presbyterian convention (that's who the manager said they were) were big troublemakers and caused every problem that I interacted with on the elevator. that and somebody's dad.

we were counting and dad was number 7. He says to his 3 or four kids "there's room here, get on!" The kids were like, teenagers by the way. Not children, kids in a relative sense. They looked sort of harried as if they were kind of embarrassed. Poor kids being forced by their guardian to break the rules....

[Mushoku145]

Elevator issues is one of the many reasons why there are stairs. And yes I used the stairs from the 11th floor down and up. On certain occassions.

[Radien]

Not to be a total downpour in this BUT there is a button on the elevator called "cancel call".  pressing this will cancel button press's.  if this dosent work you can use the intercom to contact the lobby who can reset the panel quickly.  this does pose problems in and of itself BUT I found it helped imensly when I was on floor 14 and had to get to the lobby IN A HURRY.

Oh crap, I wish I'd known this before!! I always though "Call Cancel" was for cancelling a call if you accidentally pressed the button with the fireman's hat on it (for calling for help). I also didn't know you could call the lobby for a quick reset. That's great, because the front desk isn't as busy as other staff.

That's not a downpour at all! Thanks! It's very useful information; I hope everybody noticed it! (Including those helpful Yojimbo volunteers on floor 1)

sumomo-san:

That sounds relatively harmless, as long as no one was annoyed once they tried to board. It was no worse than baby Plucky Duck. "Elah-later go down the hole!!"


valliegirl:

Whoah, the elevators are "out of circulation!" I'm not all that surprised considering how fancy they are. Yeah, breaking limited-production elevators = bad.

I'm sure convention attendees weren't the cause of all of the elevator trouble, or perhaps not even the majority of it... there was at least one other convention and one wedding held at the Doubletree that weekend. I just hope we can keep track of our own people. I wouldn't have mentioned this at all if I couldn't have confirmed that at least one prank was Kumori Con-related.


As for taking the stairs, I went down to the lobby from the tenth floor once. My costume has some shoe accessories that make the soles slippery, though, so I avoided it from then on, out of fear that I'd slip and crack my skull open. >_<

[washutaku]

Oh crap, I wish I'd known this before!! I always though "Call Cancel" was for cancelling a call if you accidentally pressed the button with the fireman's hat on it (for calling for help).

I thought the EXACT same thing. It's really nice to know that there is a feature like that but I've never heard of it being used before.

[MistressLegato]

Ya know, this has me thinking, with the permission of the hotel, we could staff people in the elevators like "bellhop" type people.  You tell them which floor you want and they hit the button.
It would alleviate a lot of problems.  You guys know what I'm talking about right?  Elevator attendants?  Like uber-fancy hotels have??

[Radien]

Ya know, this has me thinking, with the permission of the hotel, we could staff people in the elevators like "bellhop" type people.  You tell them which floor you want and they hit the button.
It would alleviate a lot of problems.  You guys know what I'm talking about right?  Elevator attendants?  Like uber-fancy hotels have??

Yeah, I get your drift. That sounds like a great suggestion to me, but I'm not sure whether the hotel will give us that kind of control. Well, it wouldn't hurt to ask... Let's keep it in mind.  I'll try to suggest it at a meeting at some point. Perhaps Ops would be interested in the idea.

[MistressLegato]

Ya know, this has me thinking, with the permission of the hotel, we could staff people in the elevators like "bellhop" type people.  You tell them which floor you want and they hit the button.
It would alleviate a lot of problems.  You guys know what I'm talking about right?  Elevator attendants?  Like uber-fancy hotels have??

Yeah, I get your drift. That sounds like a great suggestion to me, but I'm not sure whether the hotel will give us that kind of control. Well, it wouldn't hurt to ask... Let's keep it in mind.  I'll try to suggest it at a meeting at some point. Perhaps Ops would be interested in the idea.

I'd work the elevators part of the time, if we get allowed to do it.  I would like to think hotels would be cool with it, as it would keep their elevators running, and safely so.  

I'll bring it up at the next meeting if ya forget n_n

[Dark-hobo]

That would be good. But to make sure you don't bork over 3 people for the con while they are on elevator duty. You should just call 3 people to do it when the elevetors start getting crowded. Like in between 3pm-6pm, that seemed like the most populated time.

But yeah and a friend found that you CAN run down the stairs faster than the elevators. Not up though, by like the 10th floor you get wasted O_o.

[Radien]

MistressLegato:

Sure, I'll mention it the next time I see Brownie. She's not online very often, but she's one of those people who always ends up shouldering a large burden at conventions. As for volunteering to help, it'd probably be best to go through the usual hoops and let next year's volunteer coordinator handle the assignments. You can always request a certain job, of course, and see if they need help there.

Dark-hobo:

You could, yes, but going down ten flights of concrete stairs at full speed seems like a bad idea to me. But maybe I'm just getting old. ;P

[Cpl. Slicks]

It seems almost tradition for elevators at Sakuracon to break though, unfortunetly.

This is a tradition we have remedied this year.

Ladies and gentlemen, the latest in vertical transportation technology has come to Sakura-Con 2006. Let me introduce you to the moving staircase, or as we like to call it....

The Escalator!


The new location has just finished refitting their escalators, including putting in a reversable one for peak traffic times.

[Waffles]

yeah running down the stairs is fun but you know  sometimes a man needs a good ride in a elevater