I was having a drink with Arjen and Costin, both colleagues of mine at SpringSource tonight at the 21st floor of the Radisson SAS hotel in Oslo. The bar there is quite nice, not just for the cocktails they serve, but mostly for the view. You can look over entire Oslo and although the skyline is not that exciting, it’s still a very nice view.

Going down in the elevator reminded me of an article I read in The New Yorker a while ago about elevator consultants. Being an elevator consultant really changes the way you experience going from the 21st floor of the Radisson to the ground floor I suspect. I think it must be quite a bit the same at IT guys like me are experiencing interacting with systems they know are built with stuff like Spring, Java or anything else they’re familiar with.

An elevator consultant basically helps designing an efficient elevator system in a building. Now for a small building that’s probably not such a big deal, but for bigger buildings, apparently there a whole bunch of things to think about, such as amount of passengers the elevator system can transport per minute, the average amount of time the people have to wait for an elevator to come (there’s probably a trehshold after which it gets annoying to wait longer I would say), the amount of elevators (more elevators leaves less space to be used for real stuff, such as appartments or office space) and the types of elevators (express elevators or ‘local’ elevators).

Until I had read the article, I had never though about all of this. It’s a line of business that you don’t often think about…

Anyway, the Radisson SAS in Oslo has 5 or 6 elevators I believe and having stayed there, I can say they either had a good elevator consultant or just put in enough elevators, because I never had to wait for a long time to get up or down, even in the morning when everybody wants to get down to the breakfast room or back up to brush their teeth.

More on elevator consultants on Wikipedia.