DC Etiquette #1: It's a great idea to charge onto an elevator before letting its passengers off first.

I work on the top floor of my building. This scintillating introductory sentence to my personal experiences with DC Etiquette, as I'd like to call it, is relevant to my personal trying tale from an idle, rainy, Tuesday trip down to the ground floor, as I had a first hand experience with the assholery that is DC elevator riding etiquette.

Allow me to begin.

After waiting a solid 5 minutes for the elevator to finish its stops on every floor of the building on the way up to my floor (which, allow me to remind you, is quite a long time in elevator waiting land, as our elevators are a far cry from "zippy"), the familiar arrival ding sounded and the doors hobbled open at a speed every old man in Florida could out-walk, I noted a middle aged man standing smack dab in the middle of the elevator, seeming poised to exit. I waited a brief moment to allow him to exit, during which period he only stared at me with the look of the subject of one of Chris Hanen's To Catch a Predator episodes just prior to the arrival of the camera crew, through wire rimmed glasses poised on a face boasting a thick, perverted old man mustache.

"...Going down?" I thought it pertinent to ask, wasn't sure if I should run back to grab my rape whistle before stepping into the elevator with him, or if I should wait for him to finish his perving, then let him out of the elevator before charging onward.

"You're on the top floor." the observant, mustached sexual predator informed me.

I nodded, purposefully not engaging the mustached sexual predator in conversation so as to avoid any attempts at conversation on the slow, painful coast down to the ground floor. However, my anti-social, stare at the floor, stand in the back corner of the elevator, conversation evasion tactics failed me, as the mustached sexual predator turned his body totally toward me and tried to casually position himself against the spot of wall directly next to me. Arms folded, he leaned in so as to more significantly violate my personal space, and with quite the sneer spreading across his face, he said, disparagingly, "You're on the top floor."

I seized the opportunity to try to bring conversation to a total halt with a clever reply:

"Yes."

"Where else were you going to go but down?"

Damnit, that didn't work. Alright, mustached offender, game on.

And so I informed him that I was taught to wait a moment before entering an elevator so as to afford others the opportunity to exit before stomping on. We quickly cleared up that I was not unsure of the number of floors in my workplace, but rather that I was merely attempting to be polite. He immediately straightened up and moved to the opposite corner of the elevator car. And when the doors opened to relieve us of our awkward journey, the woman waiting for the elevator on the ground floor came charging on before we had a chance to exit.




DC AREA ELEVATOR RIDERS: surely, you are familiar with the way boarding the metro goes in the morning. You wait for other riders to exit before boarding the train. Not only is this a bit of a common courtesy, but IT MAKES SENSE. Apply this rule to riding elevators, everywhere. Pausing .2 seconds for people riding the elevator to get off the elevator before you come barreling into the elevator with the urgency of a Jewish woman trying to get to the front of the line of Black Friday sales, will not significantly delay your journey to your end destination.