>>> 2023-03-13 the door close button

This will probably be a short one, and I know I haven't written for a while, but it has always been the case that you get what you pay for and Computers Are Bad is nothing if not affordable. Still, this is a topic on which I am moderately passionate and so I can probably stretch it to an implausible length.

Elevator control panels have long featured two buttons labeled "door open" and "door close." One of these buttons does pretty much what says on the label (although I understand that European elevators sometimes have a separate "door hold" button for the most common use of "door open"). The other usually doesn't seem to, and that has lead to a minor internet phenomenon. Here's the problem: the internet is wrong, and I am here to set it right. This works every time!

A huge number of articles confidently state that "80% of door close buttons do nothing." The origin of this 80% number seems to be a 2014 episode of Radiolab titled "Buttons Not Buttons," which I just listened through while doing laundry. Radiolab gets the statistic from the curator of an elevator history museum, who says that most of them "aren't even hooked up." This is reason to doubt our curator's accuracy. I don't think there is anything malicious going on here, but I do think there is an element of someone who has been out of the industry for a while who is at least misstating the details of the issue.

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