Fake Apologies For Holding Up Elevators Must Stop

I have a special fondness for Elevators. I spent a lot of time in High School working out of Otis Elevator, who generously sponsored my school’s FIRST Robotics team. I’d get to talk to the engineers, use their awesome tools, and will never forget the constant noise of their testing machinery. Elevators are great (as long as there isn’t too much elevator traffic), and I use them almost every day living in New York City.

Because I use elevators so often, I’ve keenly observed many patterns that passengers adhere to. About once a week I’ll step onto an elevator, the door will close, and then instead of going up the door suddenly opens again. This happens when the button is pressed from the outside before the elevator has a chance to go up. Theoretically this could happen by mistake, where the person pressing the button arrived just into the lobby just after the last person stepped into the elevator. In this case the person pressing the button would not know that their actions would cause the elevator doors to reopen and to delay all the other passengers.

However, I know the lobby of the buildings that I use elevators in very well, and I’ve gotten to know a lot of the faces of the other passengers. Logistically speaking, after entering the building lobby and walking over to the elevator, it is impossible to not be aware of an elevator whose doors have just closed but has yet to rise - at least for the elevators I use. Therefore, whoever presses the button at that stage knows full well the ramifications of their actions. They are willing to delay all the other passengers in order for them to catch this elevator, instead of the next one.

The perpetrators of such a rude act are almost always office regulars who don’t seem to be in any real rush to get back to their desk. When the doors open they almost always look down and mutter something along the lines of “sorry” in a soft and sheepish tone as if to convey that this were all some sort of accident. However, these people are certainly not sorry. They knew exactly what they were doing, and simply think their time is worth more than all the other people they would be delaying by doing what they did. Obviously I’d prefer that elevators disabled this to occur in the first place, or that people refrained from doing this except in actual emergencies. However until those things happen, the least that people can do is not lie to an elevator full of people telling them you are sorry, when in fact you are simply embarrassed at your own selfishness.