grgr (34): elevator stewardess

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 "... for those faint hearts who first thing on entering seek out the 
certificate of inspection on the elevator wall, there are young women in green 
overseas caps, green velvet basques, and tapered yellowstripe trousers---a 
feminine zootsuite effect---who have been well-tutored in all kinds of elevator 
lore, and whose job it is to set you at ease. 'in the early days,' pipes young 
mindy bloth of carbon city, illinois, smiling vacantly away in profile, ..." 
           (735)

   "... the preference for puppet-women shows itself also in many other, less 
perverse ways of behavior. for example, the lift-girls, who are so popular in 
modern shopping malls, are especially trained to act as puppet-like as possible. 
elegantly dressed with uniforms and snow-white gloves, they greet the customer 
with affected falsetto voices and then they, like toy soldiers, perform ritual 
movements of the arms to indicate the direction of the elevators: up and down, 
to the left and to the right, always along the same pattern. 
 these girls are not only trained to speak like women actors on stage, they also 
have to learn the precision of ceremonial bow like a precious skill. a proud 
personnel manager once led me through a training center. he explained how the 
girls are taught the perfect bow by a machine. it's out of rustproof steel and 
it stands right in the middle of a perfectly clean room. a steel rod on the 
backside of the girl let her bend the body in the liked angle: fifteen degree, 
thirty or fourtyfive, which all was accurately registered by a digital display. 
'you know, this machine is not only for starters', the personnel manager assured 
me while helping on a young female clerc with a cane, 'also women, who already 
have worked some time among us, use it from time to time to practise bows.' in 
some shopping malls they even went a step further and decided out of economic 
reasons to use real puppets instead of living ones. this was a mistake, the 
customers complained because they missed the 'human touch'." (m.o.p.a.t. from 
the german edition of ian buruma's "a japanese mirror" [1984], pp. 92f.)

 kfl