Maybe now Otis can remove the ‘Door Close’ button

The new Google computer will not have a ‘CAPS LOCK’ key.  I guess the people at Google feel it is unnecessary.  My understanding is they will replace it with a ‘search’ key.

Perhaps now the elevator people can either remove the ‘door close’ button or install one that actually works.

I recall, but cannot find, a list of clauses finishing the sentence, “If God were a man, ….”  One of them was “pushing the elevator door close button would work with a promptness that might cause injury”.

I did find many people questioning whether the buttons actually work.

At Snopes, people are debating the question.  At The Straight Dope, it is claimed that:

The grim truth is that a significant percentage of the close-door buttons in this world, for reasons that we will discuss anon, don’t do anything at all.

Naturally, this is not something the elevator companies wish to have widely known, lest there be social unrest. When I talked to the folks at the Otis elevator company in Farmington, Connecticut, they were all innocence.

At wikipedia, it seems that the button works when the elevator is being used in non-standard ways:

This mode was created for firefighters so that they may rescue people from a burning building. The phase two key switch located on the COP has three positions: off, on, and hold. By turning phase two on, the firefighter enables the car to move. However, like independent service mode, the car will not respond to a car call unless the firefighter manually pushes and holds the door close button. Once the elevator gets to the desired floor it will not open its doors unless the firefighter holds the door open button. …

and with “Independent service”: The elevator will remain parked on a floor with its doors open until a floor is selected and the door close button is held until the elevator starts to travel. Independent service is useful when transporting large goods or moving groups of people between certain floors.

As the Straight Dope suggests, maybe I need to visit Farmington:

Among other things, I was told that the close-door buttons at Otis HQ (which, the views of the cynics notwithstanding, is not located in a one-story building) always work like a charm.

This is comforting news, needless to say. I would suggest that any harried city dweller who has never seen a close-door button that actually did something might want to make a field trip out to Farmington to inspect the genuine article.