The Door Close Button
computer.rip
computer.rip
It also gives a lot of fascinating information about elevators in general and specific operation modes.
e.g. there is a "riot mode" where the elevator goes to every floor except the first (or ground in EU) floor aka to the lobby. The idea was that, during a riot, a luxury building in NYC would lock the stairwell access from the lobby but people could still take the elevator to the other floors to visit their neighbors etc
Wow. Well, loopholes are loopholes I guess.
> he wouldn't have put them there
Yes...that's right....he didn't.
I personally don't have any problem with the idea of exploiting loopholes, I mean, it is Hacker News, and cleverness and exploiting loopholes is pretty much the definition of being a hacker. But from a religion perspective, it looks more like an atheist, or even satanist value.
Also exercise benefits, but I make myself take the stairs under the guise of saving time.
I do wonder, however, whether there are dedicated individuals within religious organizations that assess a given spiritual framework and consider workarounds for things that might be dangerous to the health of their religious community.
It strikes me that if you're deriving whether an action is safe for your religion based on a technicality like "a signal light turns on", then either:
1. Your religion needs to lighten up a bit. I doubt any deity cares about small technical details like that.
or
2. You're in violation of rules anyway. The intent is still there, so even if you're using a loophole, there's no practical difference between those two actions. Both you and whatever deity know you're committing an offense.
Although I respect the cleverness of workarounds like this... come on! You're still violating the spirit of the "law!"
In my building the elevators were brand new (less than a few months old) and were constantly out of order. The service mechanic was called in time after time, he would arrive, run diagnostics, find that nothing was wrong, then reset the control system and leave.
After the 10th time or so, the building manager demanded to have the entire system replaced under warranty. The manufacturer told us: there is nothing wrong with the lift, but you guys are constantly pressing the close door button, this breaks the lift! So obviously our abuse of the lift was not going to be covered under warranty.
We called their bluff we had the mechanic disable the close button. The lift still broke. A week later the entire control system was replaced (under warranty) and the lift has functioned normally ever since, though they never enabled the close door button again... :-(
I'm not sure I understand the argument? Why does this break the elevator? Why would a built-in button crashing the elevator not be considered a fault?
It doesn't
> Why would a built-in button crashing the elevator not be considered a fault?
The manufacturer was trying to get out of a warranty claim, hoping the customer was naive enough to believe their story.
To be fair, I worked in the service industry for many years (as a controls technician), and I had many co-workers who intentionally set up long cons like this to stay busy. They would come up with equally outlandish reasons for why they needed to keep going back and upper management was mostly clueless as to how ridiculous they were.
1) Buttons themselves have on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of presses expected before any form of failure could begin to be expected. OPs story of a new lift failing would not even come close with a person standing there 24/7 mashing the button
2) A button failing would be just that: a failed button. Not an entirely failed control system. One would assume the button to be a Normally-Open activation, such that continuity in the circuit is achieved when the button press occurs so a failed button would look to be like a button that hasn't been presssed anyway. I'd be happy to be corrected on this, but a Normally Closed button is often only really used for safety sake where a break in the line, loss of voltage, or a button press are all treated equally by the control system.
Even if it did, how can this be an excuse? It is obvious such a button is intended to be used for normal operation. The person answering that was probably clueless and/or desperate, any excuse would have worked better: the occasional overload, superficial and unrelated damage, kids jumping and mashing buttons, etc...
I guess such tactics may work on naive consumers, but I hope building managers know better than to fall for such bullshit. Case in point, yours didn't.
And it was amazing! Well, as amazing as such a thing can be - to push a button and have immediate feedback/response (it also felt like the doors even closed faster than they do here).
Pushing a button and having it do nothing is one of those frustrating little indignities, it’s bad with software and it’s even worse in the real world.
Letting people hammer on the button without feedback gives them something to kill time with and the wait is more palatable.
On the other hand, while living in El Salvador, there were two things I missed from other country's elevators.
- The star symbol sign the main floor button like in the U.S.
- The European floor numbering system.
It's just that some architects here get too creative in Latin America and name their floors S2, S1, PB, MZ, 2, 3 so it's not always clear which floor is the main one.
Of course, I think everyone's probably done it at least once simply due to inattentiveness.
What's the problem?
Overall it's the same amount of stops regardless whether you take the right or the wrong one. But for some reason being in an elevator that stops without anyone getting in or out irks me.
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-natural-log
And before anyone goes raging about “ableism against the colourblind!”, that's usually much darker than the rest of them, so it stands out anyway.
I recall vaguely a story they did about how it was hard to walk straight while blindfolded and how weird that was, and I immediately flashed back to a college professor demonstrating this in a controls theory class... But as a proof of how inaccuracy mounts in an open-loop control system, because that's actually entirely expected (the odds random error would sum consistently to zero is what would be weird and unexpected).
If elevators allowed that, then as soon as the doors started to open, a selfish elevator rider would think "sorry, you losers out there in the elevator lobby, I gotta get to floor 7 ASAP, so you can take the next one" and push the button.
So common sense says the button is only going to let you fine tune how long the door stays open, not have complete control. So you shouldn't conclude from the fact that it doesn't give you complete control that it must not do anything.
So the door close button, by regulation, can do little or nothing
Some do actually stop opening and close the doors halfway through. Never once seen someone do that.
I mean if you are gonna be a dick, you can shove people out of the elevator anyway. No need for a button.
Seems like the same principle behind online trolling or road rage: putting a layer of tech and/or anonymity between the person and their victim makes it easier for people to be cruel to each other.
I did not see it being abused, but I don't know if many people had found out about it. I did not use it unless the lobby was empty of people heading for the elevators.
However, I would advise against it as you'll then be in a closed space with someone who likely didn't want your company anyway.
Once the minimum open time has been reached and the minimum time from until start of closing has been reached there should be no further limits on open/close timing under those regulations as written for the rest of that car's stay at that floor.
I've seen elevators that do implement at that way. Once the first open finishes and the first close starts the "open" and "close" buttons both act immediately.
This comes in useful when the elevator arrives, people get off and on, and then as the doors close someone running down the hall shouts asking to hold the elevator. Someone inside can press "open" to reverse the closing, and then as soon as the person gets in a press of "close" resumes closing (even if the door had not yet finished opening).
The hack I learned is that the call buttons on the outside also function as door-open buttons once the lift has arrived, so it can override the jerk inside pounding the close button.
People are assholes. Also, a lot of people would just get into the habit of hitting the door close button the moment they step on without even looking for anyone else.
If you allow the button to do that, quite a few people would abuse it.
In my opinion, there are enough bad actors to justify preventing them from abusing the system.
In addition, the elevators should all have microphones and speakers in them, so the AI control system can talk to the asshole inside. When he demands to let out, the AI can say, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do."
If it didn’t, I’d use the elevator even less than I do. Stairs to/from the third floor is just about the same time as the elevator.
It's in the US and Canada that the placebo, non-working "door close" button seems to be the norm, due to regulations in those countries.
So why have a "door close" button at all in the US? I guess because most elevator designs/manufacturers have their origins in Europe. ThyssenKrupp (Germany), Kone (Finland), Schindler (Germany), etc. And rather than design a different panel for the European and North American markets, they just have one common design but with the software configured differently.
If only the article you're commenting on described in detail a secondary, safety-critical function of that button, maybe we wouldn't have to resort to this kind of speculation.
Oh well. Maybe next time!
Maintenance put one elevator into this mode to help us with moving in. The elevator stayed open at the floor until door close was pressed and held long enough for the doors to close at which time it became eligible to move to the specified floor.
As explicitly stated in the article:
(1) Its a legal and functional requirement for fire service mode, when automatic door closing is completely disabled.
(2) Some users (the article specifically tested hospitals, based on experience of very long normal door hold times there that would suggest their should be a window between the minimum and normal hold time) do, in fact, configure minimum and normal hold time with a window which allows the button to operate.
It’s not a “non-functional button”. Its a button which is functional, but where the variable it controls is often configured by users to have no range of variability.
But I think it’s fair to say that in most US elevator installations, when the elevator is operating in its normal mode (not service or fire mode), the button has no effect.
Not quite. There is both a minimum door hold time and a door hold time. If the door hold time is longer than the minimum door hold time, the close door button works after the minimum door hold time. Only if these times are the same does the button effectively do nothing.
Not in my experience. I'd say it works in maybe 50% of lifts. Maybe less.
Kind of hilarious that this guy thinks he has proved everyone wrong by checking two lifts!
Other fun facts:
- you can push and hold the door close button before the doors have fully opened, and once they get all the way open they will immediately close.
- a couple months ago, the door close button broke and my daughters and I noticed it *immediately* and it was actually fixed within a couple weeks.I could be wrong but I think the ADA was a little overzealous. 99% of the time there isn't someone with low mobility trying to walk over to the elevator. The 1% of the time someone is having trouble, I've never seen them pound the door close button; they hold their hand to block the light curtain until they get in. (When the elevator starts beeping and doing the slow-close thing, that's when I take my hand out. I've never seen anyone's hand get crushed in the elevator, but you can tell it wants blood.)
I hate that this has become the norm for journalism where only one person does any actual research, and then tons of other outlets paraphrase it and publish their own version. It devalues the work (why would you go through the trouble of actual research when you can just rip off someone else?), makes it difficult to tell where the story actually came from, and it pollutes the search space with dozens of copies of the same story each with slightly less connection to the original source material.
It's a lot like the XKCD wikipedia citation loop: https://xkcd.com/978/
The button mashers were right all along! I'd always thought it was futile to keep pressing the close-door button, but it sounds like if you "mash" it you're more likely to hit that sweet spot where the button is active.
Relatedly, in the past I've been on a (very old) elevator, which just waited with the doors open at the last floor it was called to, and didn't even have a close nor open button for the doors. Selecting a floor, and possibly calls from other floors, would close them automatically, and they would open when the elevator arrived at its destination.
The article discusses some of the various configs and rules pretty well. After reading about the distance requirements, it's unsurprising to me that smaller apartment buildings or lobbies are where I've most frequently seen "more responsive" door close buttons. It was pretty damn quick in my old apartment, probably tiny lobby + not super fast door opening so the minimum was eaten into by the time from "ding" to "fully open."
I used to see people visibly surprised that it worked when I used it in that building!
("Push to cross" buttons have the same sort of fun, but with slightly more potential consequence for the people who seem to refuse to ever push them...)
Of course I make some generalities as it depends but it is my general memory of Japanese elevators. Also you can "deactivate" Floor button by double tap or hold if you pressed the wrong one.
As for crossing buttons... generally they do work in the UK. It's just that if the crossing is in the middle of a normal road (read, where there's no reason for the lights to change automatically) it's required, whereas if the crossing is at a junction, it'll merely display the signal to cross whenever the lights would be set to change anyway.
Particularly obnoxiously, if you are even a millisecond late in pressing the button (traffic just got the red light), you won't get the walking man until the next cycle.
Infuriating.
It's pretty easy to find photos of these elevators.
https://duckduckgo.com/?va=t&t=ha&q=elevator+with+no+close+b...
Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but in general I hope the discussion of ADA and the ASME code makes it clear that I'm talking about the US. Actually the ASME code mostly applies directly to Canada as well as a separate but harmonized code.
These two things combined lead to an elevator culture where somebody will usually hold the door open button until everybody gets in, then press the door close button. Efficient.
Meanwhile, some elevators (hospitals are the example given) do hold the door open longer than the minimum, and the close button works in those places, per their testing.
Close doors when all other parameters are satisfied. * * The minimum door opening time parameter might be the standard door closing time parameter
I definitely would try to convince people of random incorrect technological things when I was younger (like high school). That sounds exactly like something I would have done...
The door close button very obviously does something on those elevators.
But on all the ADA upgraded intersections, the crosswalk buttons DO start announcing the count down time, and what intersection they are at.
So, they do something, but they won't change the time it takes the light to actually change.
Elevator buttons should be illuminated, but only when available. That would be a cool way to see exactly when and if the thing becomes useful, and save the user some annoyance.
The elevator button is more complicated but I think the typical uselessness combined with misleading label is enough to qualify. The reason it exists isn't placebo, but the way it's set up makes it a placebo, even if it's via negligence.
People are being tricked by the presentation, and it's being left that way out of lack of caring.
Negligence is a form of intent. Especially it's intent when new elevators are getting the same treatment.
Sorry, but from the POV of the user one does not care whether it's the "elevator controller" blocking the input or the button is not connected at all. The end result is the same - you walk into the elevator, press the button, and nothing happens. Hitting an annoyed user with an anecdotal "actually if the door hold timer was longer the button would work just fine!!!" doesn't help in the slightest.
If you got “the button actually doesn’t work” out of the same article that I did, then one of us needs to take reading comprehension lessons.
On some elevators, it's programmed to actually close the doors for a regular passenger.
On some elevators, it's programmed to only respond to firefighters, janitors, or other people who have the ability to put the elevator into a local control mode.
It varies from building to building. Everything else is a placebo.