What you write is all true of course, and this has been a long-standing debate, which I thought had been resolved long ago.

Europeans tend to think of the smallest integer as zero, while Americans tend to think of it as one. This, despite the fact that, supposedly, the Maya, a meso-american people, invented zero. Examples of this occur in the numbering of floors (architecture) and the designation of bars (measures) in music.

Starting at one makes no sense because you are constantly having to adjust by one. A European who has a bad leg, for example, asks his friend which floor his apartment is on. I am on floor 3, he says. Subtracting 0 from 3 suggests three flights of stairs which are within his capabilities to climb so, instead of taking the elevator, he gets some exercise. But, when visiting the US, he gets the answer “I am on the fourth floor,” and so our hero takes the elevator only to find that he could have walked up the three flights.