The Little Platoons can carry the weight of the lifts
Apparently the cornucopia of pies available to the mere working class and proletariat these days means that lifts are too small. Or do not carry enough weight.
Capacity of lifts not kept up with UK obesity levels, study shows
Research on weight limits of elevators made in UK and Europe 1972-2004 raises concerns over safety and equity
The safety issue is a nonsense. Modern lifts will not move if too many/too large people try to use them.
Lifts are no longer big enough to fit the UK’s larger citizens, according to researchers.
This is also not true.
The research, presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Istanbul, Turkey, used photos of weight limits for 112 lifts manufactured between 1972 and 2024 in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Finland.
Prof Nick Finer, the president and chair of the International Prader-Willi Syndrome Organisation and lead author of the study, compared the average maximum weight allowance (total weight allowance divided by maximum passenger limits) with the average adult weight in the year the lift was manufactured.
What is being claimed is that given increased weights - that cornucopia of pies - then a lift that used to be rated for 8 people might now only carry 7 before the lift alarm rings and it refuses to move. As we say, the safety issue has already been dealt with.
It is possible to be callously logical here and suggest that those too obese to use the lifts would benefit from a little enforced stairwell exercise and thus, given the government’s insistence that obesity must be beaten, we should be lowering the weight limits of lifts.
There is also the solution being proposed here, that every lift on the entire continent must be redesigned for those who did eat all the pies. This would, we think, be an expensive option. It would also be something of an imposition upon us all by the Lanyards who wish to rule us. Triply, it would also be a gross waste of that expense for, obviously and clearly, the government’s campaign against obesity is just about to work, right? Right.
We too have a solution, as you would expect. This is something the Little - even if larger than of yore - Platoons can deal with. Anyone large enough that they cannot, when alone, use a standard lift is already dead (and for those very few in the process, there are freight lifts). For the rest of us slightly chubbier than the Lanyards think we should be there is that British solution, the queue. Where 8 might have ascended in one trip now only 7 can - thus the rate of ascension of the crowd slows and a queue forms. But that’s fine, we are famed for our ability to queue, even our enjoyment of the process, doing so in an orderly manner is one of those examples of civilisation we’re able to offer to other nations. Job done and it’s a good ‘un.
Come along now everyone. Self-organising a queue for the lifts is something a free people can manage without the intervention of the Lanyard Class.
Tim Worstall