Dear America, what happened to G?

First in a series of “America where things are different” posts. This one brought to you by the letter G. So … in normal countries the bottom floor of any building is called Ground or G. You press that button in a lift and you know when the doors open that you’re going to be at the bottom of the building, press 1 for the 1st Floor, 2 for the 2nd Floor, etc. Seems reasonable eh? Well not in America. Get in a lift here and there is no G button. None. So yours truly is standing in the lift in Macy’s looking at the buttons and wondering how to get to the Ground Floor. In a somewhat tentative experiment I pressed the lowest possible number, 1, and waited to see what happened. A cautious poke of my head out of the lift revealed I was on the Ground Floor. Okay… So why 1? Well it seems the Ground Floor in American IS the 1st Floor. Weird.