Minor Post by Celeste Oon

I’m currently at the PCA/ACA conference, and I wanted to share that there’s a dizzying proliferation of screens around me. There are six TVs around the bar/cafe area, all playing various sports programs. Every conference room has an electronic screen outside of it that displays the room schedule for the day. In order to present our papers, we have to connect our laptops to a projector via HDMI cable (which has left half of us scrambling for adapters), which then projects onto a mobile screen.

But most importantly, the hotel has the most bizarre set of elevators. There are no buttons on the outside or inside of the elevator. You have to scan your keycard from outside the elevator, then choose your desired floor on a touchscreen. Once you get inside, there’s a screen next to the door that displays the floor you’ve chosen (as well as the other floors in the queue, if there are multiple people). The elevator will only stop at those floors, and as there are no buttons, the only way to select a new floor is to leave the elevator and reuse the keycard-screen system from the outside. I mourn the loss of buttons!