British Buildings and the Calendar

In America, where is the first floor? That's right, reader: the floor that is at ground level. After all, it is the first floor that you walk into, so one would expect that. To clarify for buildings that are built into hills, the first floor will also be called the ground floor, marked in elevators with a "G", but the other floors are then numbers as if "G" = 1. That makes logistical sense.

In England, as in Germany and other European countries, the first floor you walk into is the ground floor. The next floor up is 1, and so on. The difference is subtle, but can cause major issues. For example, our bathroom light has not been fixed for a while. This is really annoying considering I've called twice to get the first floor bathroom light changed out. Turns out, they have changed the light outside of the bathroom next to my room, which is on the first floor above the ground.

What the Europeans are doing is actually mathematically smarter. They start counting by zero. Had all cultures done this with all counting measurements, there would have been a lot less confusion. For example: the millennium. In the year 2000, everyone was all excited to be celebrating the change of the millennium. Major parties were being thrown, and the world waited with baited breath for the computers of the world to crash and send airplanes careening around like Frisbees. But really, everyone was year early. How is that? We started counting with year 1, so the first year of the calendar went from year 1 to year 2. Year two ended with the first day of calendar year 3, and so on. To do the Math, you have to add 2000 to the first number of the calendar (which is 1), so the second millennium passed in year 2001 [2000 years since 1]. (It should be noted that this example and most of my understanding about the importance of the number zero comes from Charles Seiffe's book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. A good read, and really interesting.)

I've taken to thinking that "floor" means, "area of the house above the ground," which makes sense. If you think about it, the floor meaning level of house, is probably how they talked about the levels that came after the ground floor. After all, the floor of early houses was actually the ground. So the artificial ground below your feet when on a different level would need to be designated as something different. Thus buildings were measured by how many floors were built above the ground.

Really, though, it's one more set of codes that I have to get good at switching as I travel back and forth between the States and the UK. On that note: I'll see you all soon. Get the kettle on.