By Pentadact

That standing on an escalator is a form of mental illness. Who are these people, who have so little to do with their lives that they spend chunks of their journey just standing, not looking at anything, not talking, just standing. You two, Standing Jerks, have you been to Thailand? No? Then gentlemen, you have more reason to move than I, and yet you remain too fat and stupid to let me pass.

I think people calculate that because walking up or down them causes you to move faster than you normally do, it qualifies as hurrying. This is conflating speed and haste – it requires exactly the same amount of effort on your part to walk up or down them as it does on a regular staircase, and the distance traversed by doing so is exactly the same. To stand still, for the thirty seconds it takes to reach the top, is exactly the same as walking halfway up a regular flight, stopping for thirty seconds, then carrying on. And it’s just as irritating to those who can consistently muster the effort to put one foot in front of the other behind you.

I could believe some percentage of people were simply so weak or overweight that climbing stairs represents a level of effort they’re not willing to exert unless absolutely necessary. Except that precisely as many people – easily 90% – stand utterly stock still, a look of bovine blankness on their unthinking faces, on the way down. That’s easier than walking! You’ve got gravity on your side! I think it might actually be easier than standing.

If you’re so utterly loathe to heave your slovenly limbs forward, and have so much time to waste that even walking at a relaxed pace seems dizzyingly frantic to your glacial metabolism, why don’t you simply stop, a few steps from the bottom? Why walk, why not remain utterly motionless for another thirty seconds? What’s the hurry, Flash fucking Gordon? I thought you needed regular breaks of abject inactivity to endure with the overwhelming chore of traversing plush, air-conditioned facilities that cart you around on conveyorbelts like slabs of fatty stewing steak? Are you sure you can cope?