Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Be prepared to be shocked

Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down

If you are interested in elevators (and who isn't?), you must read this very long essay about them in The New Yorker.

I must admit I didn't know this:
In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.

Wasn't it around the early 1990's that call buttons in the economy section of aircraft also mysteriously stopped having any effect?

1 comment:

Caz said...

What is interesting about the button thing is that people don't make the connection.

The open and close buttons in the lifts in my office building work. I know this because of the direct response: press close button, doors close; press open button, they open.

Now, I'd like to think that I'd be smart enough to not bother with the buttons if the open/close was a predictably timed thing, entirely unrelated to me pushing a button.

At traffic lights I press the button, out of habit, out of ritualistic hope, in full knowledge that it makes no difference to when the lights will change and I'll be able to cross the road.