There's one part of this "the 'Close Door' button is disconnected" legend that really bothers me: the purported behavior is so trivially easy to test, but we keep falling back on "Otis Elevator engineers confirmed the fact", even though this is precisely the type of appeal to authority that we are all so quick to condemn when we observe it elsewhere. Several commenters have pointed out that they don't see this behavior in the elevators they encounter - so isn't it about time that we all did some rigorous scientific analysis?

Here, I'll start.

My own experience suggests that the close button often works, so that's the hypothesis I'm going to test. The elevator in my building is a Kone (unfortunately, I have no other information about it - no serial number was listed, and the State of Georgia doesn't seem to post elevator inspection details online).

After the doors first opened and I walked in, I observed a roughly 5 second delay on my stopwatch before the doors attempted to close. The same delay-before-closing was present when I called an elevator but did not step on, and when I took the elevator to a different floor, whether or not I stepped off. The delay before closing was reduced to three seconds for subsequent closing attempts if I interrupted the first closing of the doors with my arm. These measurements served as my baseline for subsequent testing.

I began a fresh test by stepping out of the elevator, letting the door close, and then calling it again. Upon entering the elevator, I immediately pressing the "Door Close" button without first selecting a floor, and observed the door closing immediately after. The same behavior occurred when I selected a floor before pressing "door close", but no change from the baseline was observed when selecting a floor without pressing "door close".

Conclusion: For this particular elevator model, the "door close" button does indeed cause the doors to close sooner.

I don't have a way of quickly determining whether there are, in fact, elevators out there that have intentionally disabled close buttons, but I've got a working theory about where this legend is coming from.

First, every time I've heard the claim that the "Door Close" button doesn't work, it has come from an Otis Elevator representative. It's quite possible that this is a claim that is only true for Otis elevators, but is only reported because there's very little news in putting on a ThyssenKrupp representative saying, "Our 'Door Close' buttons actually work!"

Second, I have been in elevators where selecting a floor would automatically trigger a door close event. It's plain to see that with this design, a door close button is redundant - but it's also easy to imagine a customer refusing to buy an elevator without a "Door Close" button. Adding a nonfunctional button allows the sales team to get that extra checkmark on the feature list, and also makes for a great story about "dumb management decisions" for the engineers to pass around.

I'd encourage you all to experiment with this on your own to see if this also applies for other manufactures. If you e-mail me your observations (peter@stormlash.net), I'll tabulate the data and provide it to anyone who is interested. I recommend the following test rubric:
1) How long does the door take to close when no buttons are pressed?
2) Does the time for the door to close decrease when a previous close attempt has been interrupted?
3) Does "door close" cause this time to decrease when no floor is selected?
4) Does selecting a floor cause this time to decrease?
5) Does pressing "door close" with a floor selected change anything?

Within computing, "kilobyte" has always been an ambiguous term - not only was the meaning of "kilo" ambiguous, but "byte" could refer to anywhere between six and nine bits. This wasn't cause for concern as long as systems were internally consistent, so engineers continued to use the term due to the utility it offered. This consistency is no longer possible since computers are now key components in communication systems which have always interpreted "kilo" as a SI unit.

There's a strong parallel here to the "nautical mile", which was developed because of its tremendous utility in navigation, but which is confusing to those who don't realize that "mile" means something different on a boat. If you transfer your GPS unit from your car to your boat, which type of "mile" should the device use? If you copy a 10 GB file over a 8 Mb/s data link, how long is the transfer going to take?

Computer specialists can be expected to understand the special meaning of "kilo" in certain contexts, but what of those who work outside the field of computer engineering? The modern computing experience is built on tiers of abstractions that allow the "experience" of using a computer to differ greatly from how the computer is actually designed (e.g, file sizes are already given as "quantity of information stored" instead of "disk capacity consumed"), so it's reasonable to use the word "kilo" the way 95% of the population already understands it.

This is good advice, and gives me an opportunity to speak to the community at large: some of us who go to cons and are in a position to shake tons of hands politely decline. It's not because we're being dicks, it's because we know it's a good way to substantially decrease our chances of catching and spreading any germs.

I played the PAX Pandemic game, where the Enforcers handed out stickers to attendees that read [Carrier] [Infected] or [Immune] (There was also a [Patient Zero].

I got the [Immune] sticker, and by the time I got home on Monday, it was clear that I had the flu. I've had a fever between 100 and 104 all week that finally broke last night, but I'm going to the doctor today because I think whatever I had settled into my lungs. I'll tell him about the H1N1 outbreak and get tested if he wants to run the test, but at this point I think it's safe to assume that I was [Immune] to the Pig Plague, but definitely [Infected] with the damn PAX pox.

Even though it's been a week of misery, it was entirely worth it, and I don't regret going to PAX for a single second.

This is why my motto (and fundamental rule for life) is Don't be a dick: it's simple to understand, and reasonable people can agree on what it means.

Sony BMG spokesperson: We're pleased to announce we are the final major music corporation to release electronic tracks without that pesky DRM! All you have to do is leave your house, go to a selected retail outlet, buy a special card there, go back to your house, scratch off the back of the card to find a code, go to our special MusicPass Web site, enter said code, and download one the 37 titles we have available, from Celine Dion to the Backstreet Boys!

Kid #1: Or, in the time it takes me to jump through all those hoops, I could just download all 37 of those albums off of Pirate Bay.

Kid #2: Or, I could just scratch off the back at the store, record the pin number, go home and download the album through a Tor connection, so you can't trace my IP number.

Kid #1: Also, what's with this first slate of artists? Celine Dion? Backstreet Boys? Kenny Chesney? Barry Manilow? Are you high?