Floors

Here in munchin' I've been taking the elevator up and down the building a lot, which got me thinking about floors. So let me ask the reader a simple question: If you walk into a building, what is the first floor you encounter? We USers answer this question in an exceedingly elegant way: the first floor you encounter is the first floor. Brits call it the ground floor, Czechs call it the prizemi floor, and apparently the Germans call it the E floor (not sure what the E stands for). I think what the Euronids have in mind is that these are really names for the zeroth floor, but don't want to admit it because no normal person starts counting from zero. However, one cool thing about the Euro system is that the basement and lower levels can be called the -1,-2 floors etc. In the US system, I guess we should therefore call the basement the zeroth floor. But this seems unsatisfactory, since 0 is too important a number to be applied to the basement, a place where people only go to store items which really should have been thrown away. And 0 doesn't really give the feeling of being below something, its kind of at the center. And we can't exactly skip over 0 and call the basement the -1st floor either. Because then everyone would ask what happened to the zeroth floor between the first floor and the basement. In the US I think we have failed to find an adequate solution to this problem. In parking garages we call the lower levels the "A level" or "B level," as though we need an exotic new number system to count floors below the ground. What does the reader think we should do?