A wrong job that holds on to itself

There’s something about Beijing that fascinates me of the unquestionable respect for long existing tradition and collective habits. It is a disposition of the city subconsciously descends from the empirical age. That’s why one can still find a lot of strongly dated things around the city, like the space put up for an elevator operator in residential buildings, which massively made its presence in the beginning of 1990s. The idea more or less inspired by the ticket person on the bus which occurred even earlier.

Similar design of space for busconductors

The job used to be of great significance to the social life in the neighborhood, where the operator’s role extended into communicator, information exchange center, rumor terminals and broadcast station. The job itself legitimates the priority of the person having full control of the elevator, which brought out an interesting phenomena that the affiliation between the operator and everyone in the community was explained by the simple gesture of pressing the button, whether the operator can locate the floor number of the passenger immediately, almost without any thinking, hesitated or obliged to confirmation with the person.

In those times when people still rely a lot on face-to-face conversations to manage their social presence, an elevator operator really had more of a reason to feel proud of their responsibility to connecting others. But now, when conversation within an elevator started to evaporate and people are getting more desperate to get out of it, having an elevator operator for an fully automatic machine is considered to be absurdly wrong. Somehow places like Beijing manages to keep this position with little questioning about its practicality. For things like talking to a person with a slightly familiar face in the tea shop or meeting up in the park to fly a kite are still a more common way of rendezvous for a lot of Beijing people, why getting rid of the person who would give us a random chitchat on our way home, and avoiding the awkward staring between people?