Lateral Thinking Freight Lift Sales Reminder

Notice anything unusual about this lift call button panel?

I recently felt the frustration of when a lift fails to arrive.

Galling at the worst of times, but felt more so because this service elevator was closer to me than the regular lifts. Harumph…

So I informed Management.

The buttons, it turned out, had the issue. Only the Up worked. No use to me, nor probably almost every user of this Goods Lift.

Engineers were duly called.

Yet the problem went unfixed.

Then out of the blue, I trekked on by and noticed something strange.

The panel as you see it above had ‘changed’. The Up and Down plates had got switched.

Had you ever seen anything other than ▽ the beneath △?

So what the maintenance effort had done was what I recognised as a classic workaround.

Despite not totally remedied, a way to get by for now.

And kudos to them for their lateral thinking.

Solution sellers know this trope only too well.

Yet sometimes you can lose track of when, and crucially how, one can be achieved.

Americans I’ve noticed use the term MacGyver to describe a clever semi-permanent mend; “make or repair (an object) in an improvised or inventive way, making use of whatever items are at hand”. Older generation English tend to evoke the name Heath Robinson; “an invention, machine or process that is makeshift, fragile, poorly engineered or overly elaborate”.

When I next need to summon a little bit of out-the-box thinking with a sales effort, I may well put up this pic of my – now thankfully arriving on-call – lift.