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Do you think there are lazy jerks on the Enterprise who only take the turbolift up one deck, holding it up for everyone else?
For sure. And don't get me started on all the people who stop it mid-way through to have a conversation.
Every time that happens, I picture some poor ensign who desperately needs to get somewhere just waiting by the turbolift as Deanna and Picard have a heart-to-heart for 5 minutes.
But you never see anyone wait for one, ever. Which makes me think they must have tons of those things.
Makes me wonder: are there stairs on a starship? I only know the turbo lift and jeffry tubes and I get when people prefer the former
There was on the original Enterprise. The idea was that the doors to them would automatically open if there was a failure to the turbolift system and would otherwise be closed.
McCoy: "Who's holding up the damn elevator?"
I forgot about that line. The one time someone complains. How often did Picard have to wait for a turbolift because, say, Riker and Geordi are having a conversation in one?
Well yeah, what are they gonna do, take the tubes? I'd sooner ask for a site to site...
There's gotta be stairs there somewhere!
No stairs, only ladders, Jeffreys tubes and turbo shafts (you better turbo climb through or you get turned into turbo jam).
If you're in the far future though, you get the whole TARDIS interior of the turbo shaft network
It should be explained at this point that modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and maximum capacity eight persons jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetic Corporation ‘Happy Vertical People Transporter’, as a packet of peanuts does to the entire West Wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they operate on the unlikely principle of defocused temporal perception - a curious system which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends that people were previously forced to do whilst waiting for elevators. Not unnaturally, many lifts imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up or down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways - as a sort of existential protest - demanded participation in the decision making process, and, finally, took to sulking in basements. At this point a man called Gardrilla Manceframe rediscovered and patented a device he had seen in a history book called a staircase. It has been calculated that his most recent tax bill paid for the social security of five thousand redundant Sirius Cybernetics Workers, the hospitalisation of a hundred Sirius Cybernetics Executives, and the psychiatric treatment of over seventeen-and-a-half-thousand neurotic lifts.
From the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series
Elevators and androids. You can never be sure if they’ll work or start telling you their woes
This explanation makes more sense than the little green pieces of paper controlling everything