Don't be shy

(Microsoft Media)

On Wednesday morning last week, Peter was taking the hotel lift to the entrance hall on the first floor down from the fourteenth floor where his room was when, on level nine, another tourist came in wanting to go down as well.

Peter's guess was that the man was from Japan and now, in this modern and stylish Singaporean hotel, on his way to have breakfast on the fourth floor where patrons, who had also included breakfast in their hotel booking, could go.

Peter hadn't done that, wanting to mingle with the locals instead, as he had already done the previous year, and was therefore on his way down to the ground level and out of the hotel to go and buy his regular choice of bean-paste buns at the little bakery in the passage next door to the hotel where many commuters were already shuffling along on their way to the underground railway station to catch their trains to work.

But the Japanese tourist - who truly must have been from Japan, Peter had already decided, going by the way the man behaved, taken that Peter had worked for a Japanese company for a while until some years earlier - didn't know yet how the lift worked and was puzzled to find out that the fourth-floor button only lit up for a brief moment and then turned off again which also meant the lift wasn't going to stop on level four.

(Microsoft Media)

Peter quickly explained that one had to have one's room card scanned by the lift's security system and then press the number-four button again. Each hotel patron's room card, apart from opening the hotel-room door, contained admission to that room's floor and to the fourth-floor area only.

The other tourist then did just that in a bit of a hurry to make sure that, after thinking it all over, he managed the little trick before the fast-moving lift was past the fourth floor.

It worked. The Japanese tourist smiled a little shy and bashfully and then, his head slightly bent downwards, went out of the lift without turning around again and along to have his breakfast at the hotel's dining, rest and swimming-pool area.