Pimp my office building...with tubes

(Credit: baraskit.se)

In a couple of years, when I've taken over the world, I'm going to build myself an office building. And it's going to have one of these built into it: a giant metal tube-shaped slide for easy access from the upper stories to the ground floor, like these ones found at the Tate Modern Art Gallery in London. Think about it. It'll save energy, because fewer people will be using the elevator. And it's just plain awesome. In fact, I think I'll install four or five of them, so that it's extra easy to get from one floor to the next.

(Credit: baraskit.se)

(Don't ask me how I plan to solve the "But how do you get upstairs?" problem. By the time I've taken over the world, I'll have people to come up with answers to such petty questions for me.)

Plus, they're profound. Consider them an homage not only to childhood memories of Chuck-E-Cheese and water parks (and hamster cages), but also to Senator Ted Stevens' apt characterization of the Internet as a "series of tubes."

(Via Digg)

Excite had a tube

The old Excite.com office building in Redwood City had a tube running from the second floor to the first. The major downside was that you would build up a major static electricity charge while sliding down.

[caroline.mccarthy]

Major static electricity charge?

I smell "zero-emissions energy source!" So that's how I'll power the elevators to take people back up!

[Witte_Wieven]

If only...

...they'd had these in the Twin Towers...

~WW