> That's because you kids who have been separated by rebellion for 230 years
> next week don't know the meaning of words in English.

Well, some other folks who have been separated by contract for 9 years
next week seem to agree with us Yankees.

In Chinese, floors are counted the same as in the US:
一楼 (one-floor) is at ground level, 二楼 (two-floor) is the next one up,
and so on.  However, when speaking English in Hong Kong, the British
counting scheme is employed, so the 'first floor' is one flight up
from ground level.  As a result, to properly interpret the floor number,
you have to consider what language is being spoken!

Even worse are the elevators.  Most have buttons labeled with Arabic
numerals, which are of course neither British nor Chinese.  And most,
but not all, follow the English system.  How do you tell?  You look
to see whether there is a floor zero!

Do you think we'll have to wait for 2047 to get this fixed ?

> A floor is a raised platform .  Try an _English_ dictionary.;-))

You must have looked hard to find that biased definition ;)
The O.E.D. defines the relevant meaning as equivalent to 'storey':
"a part of a building comprising all the rooms that are on the same level."

Princeton WordNet says: "a structure consisting of a room or set of rooms
at a single position along a vertical scale."

BTW, John, would a message such as this one (plain text but non-ASCII
ISO encoding) cause any problems on the lowfer list?

--Stewart